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Abu Ghraib, Iraq
May 22, 2004 Albuquerque Journal
A senator has made a Department of
Justice review critical of operations at the Santa Fe County jail part
of the ongoing controversy over America's management of prisons in
Iraq. A Department of Justice review in March 2003 had harsh words
for management of the Santa Fe County jail by Utah-based Management and
Training Corp., criticizing MTC's medical care for inmates and
concluding some conditions violated their constitutional rights.
Former New Mexico corrections secretary O. Lane McCotter is an MTC
executive and was named by Attorney General John Ashcroft to help
rebuild Iraq prisons last year. McCotter's role in Iraq prisons--
including at Abu Grhaib, where abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. military
personnel has sparked a scandal-- has come under congressional
scrutiny. Senator Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., in particular, is
making an issue of McCotter's work in Iraq and why he was chosen to go
there. A statement provided by Schumer's office reviews McCotter's
employment history, including his resignation as Utah prison director in
1997 after a mentally ill inmate died after spending 16 hours strapped
to a chair. Schumer's news release also calls attention to the
Justice report criticizing MTC's management of the Santa Fe County jail,
and notes that the New Mexico Corrections Department also raised
concerns about the jail. "While McCotter's company was under
state and Department of Justice investigation, Attorney General Ashcroft
selected him to serve as one of four civilian advisers to oversee the
reconstitution of Iraqi prisons," Schumer noted. "Why
Attorney General Ashcroft would send someone with such a checkered
record to rebuild Iraq's corrections system is beyond me," Schumer
said.
May 21, 2004 Miami
Herald
Although several cases of prisoner abuse by civilians in Iraq have been
referred to the Justice Department for possible prosecution, the FBI has
not yet been asked to investigate any of them, Director Robert Mueller
said Thursday. What Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee
seemed to indicate that the probe into whether independent contractors
or CIA officers killed prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan is moving more
slowly than on the military front, where one soldier has already been
court-martialed and others have been charged. While the faces of
military police have been splashed all over the news, the names of
almost all civilians involved -- employees of other government agencies
and civilian contractors -- were deleted from Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba's
report on the abuse at Abu Ghraib. Mueller also said lawyers for
the Justice Department and Defense Department are wrestling with
jurisdictional issues. Any crimes at the prison would have been
committed on foreign soil against foreign citizens, creating complicated
legal questions. Also Thursday, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.,
called for a Justice Department probe into two members of a U.S. group
sent to Iraq in May 2003 to help with the reconstruction of Abu Ghraib.
Lane McCotter, a former corrections chief in Utah, and John Armstrong,
who led the prison system in Connecticut, were part of a team picked by
Attorney General John Ashcroft and others in the Bush
administration.
May
21, 2004 New York Times
The use of American corrections executives with abuse accusations in
their past to oversee American-run prisons in Iraq is prompting concerns
in Congress about how the officials were selected and screened. Senator
Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, sent a letter yesterday to
Attorney General John Ashcroft questioning what he described as the
"checkered record when it comes to prisoners' rights" of John
J. Armstrong, a former commissioner of corrections in Connecticut. Mr.
Armstrong resigned last year after Connecticut settled lawsuits brought
by the American Civil Liberties Union and the families of two
Connecticut inmates who died after being sent by Mr. Armstrong to a supermaximum
security prison in Virginia.
In his letter, Mr. Schumer requested that the Justice Department conduct
an investigation into the role of American civilians in the Iraqi prison
system.
Another official, Lane McCotter, who was forced to resign as director of
the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an incident in which a
mentally ill inmate died after guards left him shackled naked to a
restraining chair for 16 hours, was dispatched by Mr. Ashcroft to head a
team of Americans to reopen Iraq's prisons. After his resignation in
Utah, Mr. McCotter became an executive of a private prison company, the
Management and Training Corporation, one of whose jails was strongly
criticized in a Justice Department report just a
month before the Justice Department sent him to Iraq.
May
12, 2004 The Nation
In 1997 a 29-year-old schizophrenic inmate named Michael Valent was
stripped naked and strapped to a restraining chair by Utah prison staff
because he refused to take a pillowcase off his head. Shortly after he
was released some sixteen hours later, Valent collapsed and died from a
blood clot that blocked an artery to his heart.
The chilling incident made national news not only because it
happened to be videotaped but also because Valent's family successfully
sued the State of Utah and forced it to stop using the device. Director
of the Utah Department of Corrections, Lane McCotter, who was named in
the suit and defended use of the chair, resigned in the ensuing
firestorm. Some six years later, Lane McCotter was working in Abu Ghraib
prison, part of a four-man team of correctional advisers sent by the
Justice Department and charged with the sensitive mission of
reconstructing Iraq's notorious prisons, ravaged by decades of human
rights abuse. While McCotter left Iraq shortly before the current
scandal at Abu Ghraib began and says he had nothing to do with the MPs
who committed the atrocities, his very presence there raises serious
questions about US handling of the Iraqi prison system. It's bad enough
that the Justice Department picked McCotter--whose reputation in Utah
was at best controversial and at worst disturbing. But further, the
Justice Department hired him less than three months after its own civil
rights division released a shocking thirty-six-page report documenting
inhumane conditions at a New Mexico jail, run by the company
where McCotter is an executive. Then,
on May 20, in a case of unfathomable irony, Attorney General John Ashcroft
announced that McCotter, along with three other corrections experts, had
gone to Iraq. The very same day, Justice Department lawyers began their
first negotiations with Santa Fe County officials over the extensive
changes needed at the jail to avoid legal action.
May 11, 2004 AP
A former New Mexico corrections secretary helped to reopen an Iraqi
prison that is now the center of a prisoner abuse controversy.
O.L. "Lane" McCotter, who was corrections secretary
from the late 1980s to the end of 1990, was in Baghdad from May to
September last year overseeing
the reconstruction of the Abu Ghraib prison. The
prison is where pictures were taken of naked Iraqi prisoners piled
on top of one another and positioned by American soldiers in pretend
sex acts. McCotter
said his primary duty in Iraq was to evaluate the structural
status of the prisons. McCotter's
tenure in this state ended with some controversy. In October 1988, a
court-appointed prison monitor accused state prison officials of erasing
a portion of a videotape of a prison disturbance to cover up acts of
brutality against inmates.McCotter left New Mexico to run the Utah
Corrections Department. But he resigned in 1997, two months after a
mentally ill inmate died after spending 16 hours strapped to a
restraining chair. After that
incident, McCotter went to work for a Utah-based private prison company,
Management & Training Corp., which operates the Santa Fe County
jail.
May 10, 2004 Salt
Lake Tribune
The Abu Ghraib prison, where U.S. military police were photographed
abusing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners, was rebuilt under the
supervision of two former Utah Department of Corrections
directors. Gary DeLand and O. Lane McCotter say they were told the
project -- financed with money confiscated within Iraq -- would not be
used to detain prisoners of war. McCotter has first-hand
experience with controversy over how prisoners are treated. He resigned
as Utah prison director in May 1997, within two months after a mentally
ill inmate died after spending 16 hours strapped naked to a restraining
chair.
Benson, Arizona
July 28, 2004 News-Sun
Moving forward on funding a $25 million detention center, the Greater
Benson Economic Development Corporation has elected its officers and
created bylaws. The group drew a lot of controversy when it was
created by the City Council on July 7. Leading the new corporation is
David DiPeso, unanimously selected as president. Councilman Ted
Amox, is five president; Beverly Stepp, is secretary; Mike Montroy is
the treasurer. Serving as second vice president will be Dr. Mark
Kartchner. "They want to build this thing as soon as possible
so that's the reason for this hurry," Amox said. "I think
Cochise County is the most likely candidate in the United States for a
facility like this." City Manager Boyd Kraemer said the city
of Benson can't borrow the money to fund the facility without voter
approval, which is where the corporation comes in. The plan is for
the group to borrow $25 million through revenue bonds, which will
supposedly be paid for over the next 22 years, through profits from
detainees being held at the facility anywhere from three to nine months.
Once the debt is paid, the City will own the facility. The benefit
of this plan, Kraemer said, is that the city is in no way liable and
taxes won't increase to pay for the facility. Kevin Pranis, a
criminal justice policy analyst for Justice Strategies in New York City,
said he's been studying privately owned detention centers for the last
two years and to say there is going to be no risk to the city is
"laughable." "If bonds go into default the investor
is never the one to get hurt," Pranis said. "This may be
successful, but if it's not, someone is going to have to pay and the
city will be right in the middle of it. The investors have the money to
file the lawsuits and fight it. The city doesn't, and will probably end
up paying for it. The city isn't an expert in bond laws or with the
detention-center market. There are no guarantees." Neither
the city nor Matador has contacted the U.S. Marshals office about using
the Benson facility. Brian Nernex, assistant chief deputy of the
U.S. Marshals office in Tucson, said he found out about the proposed
facility through the San Pedro Valley News-Sun article on July 14 and
the office has not committed to using it. Pranis said its common
for privately owned facilities to not only leave the public out of the
process, but also the law-enforcement agencies that are said to be
behind the project. Besides the Marshals office not being
contracted, Cochise County Sheriff Larry Dever has also been left out of
the loop. "I have not been talked to directly," Dever
said. "With something as big as this it does surprise me that they
haven't even talked to the Marshals office."
Borallon
Correctional Centre,
Queensland, Australia
A TENDER for the state's two privately-run prisons is not a
criticism of the current operators, the Queensland Government said today.
Corrective Services Minister Judy Spence said new tenders to run Borallon and
Arthur Gorrie correctional centres, valued at a total of $200 million, would
ensure taxpayers got value for money. "It is not about the performance of the
current operators,'' Ms Spence said. The Arthur Gorrie jail has been under fire
in recent years over a number of deaths in custody, security failures and
assaults on prisoners by staff. Borallon made headlines four years ago when a
report showed it had the highest rate of illicit drug use in the state, with
almost one in three prisoners using drugs. Four companies will be invited to
tender: GEO Group Australia Pty Ltd, GSL Australia Pty Ltd, Management and
Training Corporation Pty Ltd and Serco Australia Pty Ltd. GEO currently operates
Arthur Gorrie, and Management and Training Corporation operates Borallon. Ms
Spence said the contracts would be for five years, with an option for Queensland
Corrective Services to extend them for a further five years. The tenders will be
evaluated in the first half of next year with new contracts to start on January
1, 2008. An independent probity auditor has been contracted to oversee the
entire project.
February 22, 2004
OFFICERS at a privately-run prison in Queensland will
walk off the job again over the next two days. Prison officers at the Borallon
Correctional Centre, near Ipswich, will lock prisoners in their cells during
six-hour stoppages tomorrow and on Tuesday in a dispute over enterprise
bargaining negotiations The prison is operated by the US-based prison
company Management and Training Corporation (MTC), under contract to the
Queensland Government. Last week, about 500 low and medium security
inmates were locked in their cells for two hours on Monday and Tuesday morning.
The prison officers' union, the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers
Union, said it would increase the length of the stoppages if the dispute dragged
on. About 150 prison officers have been
calling for a six per cent annual pay rise over the next two years but MTC
offered an increase of just 1.9 per cent a year. MTC
also wants to reduce prison officers' sick leave entitlements to six days a year
from eight in the last agreement which expired last month. LHMWU
spokesman Ron Simon said the union would also ban overtime at the prison.
"Each week we've increased the length and intensity,
of the walkout," he said. "This
time our members are stopping twice for six hours and imposing a two-week
overtime ban, commencing Monday morning." (Townsville Bulletin)
February 9, 2004
INMATES at Borallon Correctional Centre near Ipswich will
be placed in lockdown mode tomorrow and Tuesday as prison officers strike in
support of increased wages and benefits. Almost 500 low and medium
security inmates at the privatised prison will be locked down and managed under
a skeleton staff structure for two hours from 8am (AEST) tomorrow and on
Tuesday, while members of the Liquor Hospitality and Miscellaneous Union (LHMU)
rally for a pay increase. The prison has
been run by US firm Management and Training Corporation (MTC) since September
2000, under contract to the Queensland government. About
150 prison officers, whose current enterprise agreement expired last month, are
calling for a six per cent annual pay rise over the next two years in addition
to paid parental leave and income protection. (Townsville Bulletin)
August 14, 2001
Drugs and illegal 'home brew' have been discovered during random searches in
Queensland's prisons. Four prisoners have also lost open security
classification after testing positive to drugs. Two prisoners already in
custody are facing charges after random searches uncovered drugs at Borallon
Correctional Centre and illegal brew at Borallon and Woodford Correctional
Centres. (ABC News)
Bradshaw State Jail, Texas
November 25, 2003 Texas Lawyer
Private prison-management corporations and their employees may be sued
under §[1983 by a prisoner who has suffered a constitutional injury.
FACTS: Billy Rosborough is a prisoner in the Bradshaw State Jail, a
Texas prison owned and operated by defendant Management and Training
Corp., a private prison-management corporation. Defendant Chris Shirley
is a corrections officer employed by MTC at the jail. Rosborough sued
MTC and Shirley under 42 U.S.C. §[1983 alleging that he was subjected
to cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment
when Shirley maliciously slammed a door on Rosborough's fingers,
severing two fingertips. Rosborough also alleges that Shirley displayed
deliberate indifference to Rosborough's resulting serious medical
condition. In addition, Rosborough alleges that MTC is liable under 42
U.S.C. §[1983 for its improper training and supervision of Shirley.
Rosborough supplemented his federal action with state-law negligence
claims.
Central North Correctional Centre,
Penetanguishene, Canada
November 8, 2006 The Mirror
About 90 per cent of jail employees will continue on at Central North
Correctional Centre when the jail moves from private to public, this
week, and provincial officials say that will ensure a smooth transition.
"We've got a lot of experience in the institution that we're going to be
keeping. So, when it comes down to the actual transition, it's going to
be largely handing over files and inventory and also switching over to
ministry operating procedures," said Stuart McGetrick, senior
communications coordinator for the Ministry of Community Safety &
Correctional Services. "Since we've got the staff and the management
already in place, largely, it's going to be a fairly straight forward
process to transfer a public operation." Ministry officials have been at
CNCC all week to prepare for the transition on Nov. 9. Staff have been
briefed in the processes and procedures of public sector jails but
McGetrick admits that doesn't mean there will be a complete switch this
week. He does, however, credit Management and Training Corporation and
the union for their assistance. "We're very fortunate that we've had
excellent cooperation from MTCC and OPSEU in the lead up to the
transition," he said. "We really anticipate a very smooth transition
process."
September 27, 2006 NUPGE CA
The staff at the only private adult jail in Canada will be public
employees again in November, ending a failed five-year privatization
experiment launched by the Conservative government of former Ontario
Premier Mike Harris. The Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU/NUPGE)
has reached an agreement with the province on the procedures to make the
transfer when the contract given by the Tories to Utah-based Management
& Training Corporation (MTC) to operate the Central North Correctional
Centre in Penetanguishene expires. OPSEU President Leah Casselman said
that she is pleased that an agreement has been reached and hopes that
the transition will be a smooth one. “Our first concern was always the
members currently working at the facility,” Casselman said. “There is
still work to be done, but the major transition issues have fortunately
been dealt with.”
August 25, 2006 The Mirror
Not enough staff at Central North Correctional Centre led to the
murder of inmate Minh Tu on May 5, 2004, charges a Penetanguishene
woman. Richard Quansah was found guilty of first-degree murder and
recently sentenced to life in prison without parole for 25 years for
killing Minh Tu, after an argument over a board game while the two were
inmates at the Penetanguishene prison operated by Management and
Training Corporation (MTC). Sharon Dion, chairperson of Citizens Against
Private Prisons, told The Mirror she is surprised more violence has not
occurred at the privately-operated jail because of ongoing problems and
lack of staff to deal with them properly. Dion is known locally and
internationally for her knowledge about privatized prisons, and has lent
her expertise to the Ontario government, as well as correctional
organizations throughout Canada and the United States. She says she was
contacted by several upset correctional officers after the May 2004
stabbing who told her that a CO was given a note from an inmate that
said there was a knife in the unit and a 'killing' would take place.
However, a lockdown and search failed to locate the weapon so inmates
were allowed out of their cells. Tu was murdered soon after. "Management
was warned that this was going to happen," said Dion. "They shouldn't
have allowed inmates to come out of their cells until something was
found or more investigation was done. And, of course, because of the
outcome, that proves the theory."
July 26, 2006 Midland Free Press
There is one Central North Correctional Centre (CNCC) employee
guaranteed a job once the province takes over operations. Facility
administrator Phill Clough has accepted employment with the ministry,
beginning Nov. 10. Ministry spokesperson Stuart McGetrick and CNCC
confirmed the offer and acceptance to The Mirror. Meanwhile,
negotiations have begun between the province and the Ontario Public
Service Employees Union (OPSEU) for correctional officers at Central
North Correctional Centre (CNCC) to keep their jobs when the province
takes over the operation of the facility. Senior officials from the
Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services met with OPSEU's
Ministry Employee Relations Committee (MERC) team to discuss the future
of more than 200 correctional officers at the jail. The meeting took
place on July 17 and lasted for a good part of the day. According to
OPSEU spokesperson Don Ford, the initial meeting was simply to lay out
each side's priorities for further talks. "First of all, (our) priority
one is to make sure that the people who are currently working at the
jail continue to work at the jail after the transition," he told The
Mirror. "From that point forward, we would also look for whatever
seniority they've accumulated under the private employer to also
continue on to the ministry." Community Safety & Correctional Services
Minister, Monte Kwinter announced in April that the privately-run jail
will be transferred into the public sector when the contract with
Utah-based Management & Training Corporation is up on Nov. 10. To date,
employees have not been told of their fate. When he made the
announcement, Kwinter told The Mirror that the province would work with
MTC to make the transition as seamless as possible. He also said there
would be more job opportunities once the jail is in the public fold. "We
need personnel to run that facility and we're going to have an increase
in personnel because we're going to staff it up to the level that we do
in (Lindsay)," he said. "So, what is going to happen, obviously, there
will be opportunities for more jobs." Although Ford spoke to The Mirror,
he cautioned that OPSEU will not report on the progress of the meetings
with the employer. "We are treating this no differently than we treat
bargaining," he said. "We're meeting with the employer and we're not
going to give a status update on those talks, other than to say, 'We're
talking.'"
May 24, 2006 Midland Free Press
Small and quiet, with dark hair and eyes, eight-year-old Sharon
Desjardins never asked for much. What she wanted, she worked hard to get
- and she wanted that baby squirrel more than anything. A boy in her
class had raided its nest and was showing off the tiny black rodent in
the schoolyard. The young girl was known for stepping in and protecting
weaker students when they were being picked on, because it was the right
thing to do. This was another one of the poor souls she was out to save.
She promised him a dollar if she could have it. It was the mid-60s and a
dollar was hard to come by. Desjardins begged and borrowed what she
could, counting up her pennies and pleading with her mom to part with
spare change until she had enough to save the pet she would later name
'Chipper.' She lets out a hearty laugh as she tells the story. "It was
house trained, I'm not kidding you. I have pictures of it sitting on our
hands, on our shoulders ... It would scratch to get in the door and
scratch to get out to the bathroom," she said. "My mother was wonderful;
she let me have pretty well any animal that I wanted." More than 40
years later, Desjardins' married name is Dion and Chipper is long gone;
but there is still a small bowl of shelled peanuts sitting on her
kitchen counter. If there is anyone with the patience and tenacity to
train a squirrel, it's this woman who has fought tirelessly to see
Canada's first and only privatized adult jail brought into public hands.
Her kitchen is larger and brighter than the one in the small Water
Street house in Penetanguishene that she grew up in, as the youngest of
three children to Bernice and Gordon Desjardins. That house, full of
troubled memories of an alcoholic father and a childhood spent in
poverty, is markedly different than the stylish and welcoming home she
has created for herself and her family. Some of the happiest times of
Dion's life have been in this room, with family and friends gathered on
barstools, comfortable leather furniture or around the large dining room
table. This is what means the most to her, she confides, looking around
the room at framed pictures of herself and her husband of 30 years, Ray,
their two children and grandchildren. Her posture is relaxed, her smile
warm and her brown eyes have lost their intense look of defiance that
marked seven long years of battling the provincial government and
corporate America. It's over; Central North Correctional Centre is going
back into the public fold. While it looks like she can rest in Canada -
for now, at least - she has accepted several invitations to speak
throughout the U.S. She admits the last several days since she received
the call from Queen's Park that the province would not renew its
contract with Utah-based Management and Training Corporation have been
emotionally exhausting. "It's elation ... something I just can't explain
and at times I'm afraid I'm going to fall when it's done ... Of course
you don't do it for the accolades, but I guess it just feels so good and
I'm just so pleased that the right decision was made by the Liberal
government." Though she admits, sometimes, even family took a backseat
to the fight. "My convictions were so strong that I couldn't let anyone
away with the nonsense that was happening," she said. The scrappy Metis
woman has been called tenacious, a defender of the defenceless,
passionate, and some names that aren't exactly flattering by those who
oppose her. But by all accounts, she brushes off these labels. She says
she is simply a woman who cares about the small community she was born
and raised in, and the people who live there. She flashes a wide smile
showing off straight, polished teeth surrounded by her trademark pink
lips, and is unapologetic when she explains why she continues standing
up for what she believes is right. "What I would like to see is money
spent on social programs. Getting children in high-risk families help so
they don't go through that revolving door. Prison privatization will
just enhance that because that's what they want; that's how they make
money. I just couldn't stand for our Canadian standards and values to be
harmed in that way." She credits her tough childhood for making her
survivor. "I guess I've always stood up for myself and I guess that's
the one credit I can give to my father; that life made me want to
survive. Nothing's been given to me. "So, I go for what I feel I want to
have. It's a good thing," she says, adding, "I look at my (past) life as
a positive not something negative." Beyond the back gate of her yard is
Fuller Avenue, a road that has gotten much busier in the past seven
years; a road that leads to Canada's first-ever private prison - a
five-year pilot project of the former Conservative government that
failed. When the leaves have fallen from her neighbours' trees that
shroud her backyard, Dion can see the edge of the prison property from
her kitchen window. She has never been against CNCC's location or the
jobs it brought to Penetanguishene. Ray is a psychiatric nurse at Oak
Ridge, Ontario's only maximum-security forensic program located at the
Mental Health Centre Penetanguishene, right beside the prison, and she
knows having incarcerated people in local facilities can work. The fight
against privatization took her to the United States, where she is a
member of the Private Corrections Institute, to Queen's Park, where she
passed on information she had about private prisons and Management and
Training Corporation, and to countless meetings and rallies where she
eloquently spoke about prison privatization. "What I love about Sharon
is she always comes prepared," Liberal MPP Dave Levac recently told The
Mirror. "She's factual. She's not emotional about it. She brings passion
to the situation, but I have to tell you that she's probably one of the
most prepared people I've ever dealt with and worked with." At times,
feeling left out of the evaluation process between Central East
Correctional Centre in Lindsay and CNCC, she didn't stop calling
politicians until she was heard. Towards the end of the process, they
even started calling her. The last four-and-a-half years that the jail
has been open have been marked by inmate deaths (Jeffrey Elliott and
Lorne Thaw), stabbings, beatings of inmates and correctional officers,
low staffing levels, and numerous security issues, she says. Although
it's acknowledged that these incidents also happen in publicly-run jails
throughout Ontario, Dion didn't want to accept it as the status quo. She
continually asked the ministry tough questions and worked hard to keep
the issues in the public eye. It wasn't always easy, but she admits to
only a handful of times when she felt like it was a lost cause. There
were even times, she confides, to feeling like she was in over her head,
as a woman from small-town Ontario. Those thoughts never lasted long.
"Of course I felt that way, but because of the knowledge that I had, I
had the courage to do what I'm doing," she says, drawing herself up
higher on the sofa. "It's the truth. I don't get paid for this. I'm not
making it up because I have documentation and that's the power. It's
simple. Anybody else could have done it." But no one else took the lead.
Dion was one person amongst dozens at a public meeting in 1996. At the
time, the Conservative government hadn't even decided that
Penetanguishene would host one of two 'super jails' the province was
proposing, but a rumour about privatization was brought up. Dion didn't
know anything about prison privatization and began to research the
issue. What she discovered she didn't like. It pushed her to dig deeper
and talk to more people in the United States that had experience in the
private prison system. In 1999, when the government announced
Penetanguishene's jail would be run by a private company, she began her
crusade against privatization and started Citizens Against Private
Prisons. "I have extremely strong convictions, when I know the issue and
I've taken the time to educate myself on them. There's no way I would
ever let anyone tell me different, because I know the truth," she says,
her voice indignant. "Every time I would ask questions of the past
government, I would basically know the answer and I'd know I was lied to
and that just (gave) me more determination." Although she has often been
at the forefront of the cause, she notes that there were always people
she could count on to help, specifically her mother and Ray, Midland
resident Dawn Marie Horn, friends and colleagues at the Private
Corrections Institute, members of OPSEU and Brant MPP Levac. Of course,
there were also the employees who had the courage to speak to her.
Although she was sometimes a sounding board for inmates and their
families, she has never professed to be an inmate advocate. When would
she find the time? When she wasn't writing letters, organizing rallies
or public forums and publicly speaking against privatization, Dion
operated her own used clothing business (she has since retired),
volunteers in Aboriginal Services at the Mental Health Centre
Penetanguishene and is a competitive a capella four-part harmony singer
with the Barrie Chorus, where she is also the assistant director. Two
years ago, she also completed five university credits towards a degree
in Aboriginal Education. Still, she took countless calls from inmates,
wives and hysterical mothers with sons inside the walls of CNCC, and
helped the father of Jeffery Elliott - the inmate who died in hospital
in 2003, after receiving a cut to his left ring finger while at CNCC -
throughout the inquest into his horrific death. They will not forget
what she has done, nor will some employees at CNCC who disagreed with
the way the prison was operated. Her phone has been ringing incessantly
since April 27, when the Minister of Community Safety and Correctional
Services announced the jail would be publicly run as of Nov. 10. Many
CNCC employees, politicians, residents and union officials have left
messages - among them, a heartfelt message from a former inmate,
thanking her for her unwavering determination and for giving a voice to
inmates like him. She can't seem to erase this one. As she re-plays the
emotional recording, her eyes tear up. Then she smiles. It's a very good
day.
May 3, 2006 The Mirror
Opponents of private prisons throughout the world are heralding the
provincial Liberal government's decision to bring Central North
Correctional Centre into the public fold. "This is a very large victory,
not only in Canada, but across the world," said Brian Dawe, executive
director of Corrections USA, a non-profit coalition of corrections
professionals from Canada and the U.S. "This is the very first time,
anywhere in the world, that any governmental agency has undertaken an
actual apples-to-apples comparison of the two public and private
prisons. No one has ever, anywhere else, designed two identical prisons
for the sole purpose of determining whether or not the private industry
should be involved in corrections or it should remain a public
function." The Liberal government announced its decision to transfer the
operation from the Utah-based Management and Training Corporation to the
public sector on April 27, after a five-year study compared the
privately-run prison with its publicly-run twin in Lindsay, Central East
Correctional Centre. During that time, Dawe said a world spotlight has
been on Penetanguishene. He noted this precedent-setting move will catch
the attention of governments in the rest of Canada, the U.S., and
beyond. Dawe gives a lot of credit to Penetanguishene resident Sharon
Dion, who has been fighting privatization of the jail since 1999, when
the former Conservative government under Mike Harris announced CNCC
could be privatized. "She deserves an incredible amount of credit for
her dogged perseverance on behalf of all of the people in, not only her
neck of the woods, but across Canada and around the world," he said.
April 28, 2006 The Mirror
Canada's only privately-operated jail will return to the public
sector in the fall. Although cost was a factor in the decision of
whether or not to keep Penetanguishene's prison privately run, in the
end, lower costs offered through Management & Training Corporation (MTC)
of Utah wasn't enough to maintain its role as the operator of the
Central North Correctional Centre (CNCC). Community Safety and
Correctional Services Minister, Monte Kwinter announced yesterday that
the jail will be transferred into the public sector when the contract
expires Nov. 10, 2006. "Our concern was to make sure we were providing a
facility that was adequately looking after the people that we have
responsibility for, the inmates, that we make sure their health-care
provisions are provided for; that we make sure their recidivism rates
(are minimized)," Kwinter said in a telephone interview with The Mirror
shortly after the decision was announced. "We want to make sure that
there is integration back into the community and there is adequate
facilities to do that, and adequate personnel resources to do that," he
said. "When we took a look at it, we just found we were getting better
results (at Central East Correctional Centre). Mind you, it's going to
cost us more money - but everything is a trade off. Overall, we felt the
citizens of Ontario would be better served with this facility being back
in public hands." Although the decision is disappointing for MTC, public
relations director Peter Mount says the private operator will continue
to work with the ministry. "We're going to work and continue to work
very closely with our partners at the ministry, especially during this
transition period," Mount said. "Our responsibility is and always will
be the safety of the public, the staff and the inmates. That's going to
continue during the transitional period." For local resident Sharon
Dion, who has campaigned against the privatization of the prison since
it was announced in 1999, the decision came as a welcomed surprise.
"It's such a triumphant day for Canada," said Dion, who received a call
from Queen's Park shortly after the decision was made. "I'm really
praising the Liberal government for making the right decision."
April 28, 2006 Midland Free Press
Canada’s first privately operated adult prison is being turned over
to the province. Central North Correctional Centre, which opened in 2001
and has been run by Management and Training Corporation since, will be
operated by the provincial government, effective Nov. 10, 2006, when
MTC's five-year contract expires. The Ministry of Community Safety and
Corrections made the announcement Thursday after completing a report
comparing CNCC with its physical twin in Kawartha Lakes, which is
publicly run. A decision on the prison's future was needed six months
prior to the current contract expiring. "On just a cost basis the
(private operation) was more economical," corrections minister Monte
Kwinter told Osprey News Thursday afternoon, "but that reflected on the
outcome. "Management and Training Corporation was in material compliance
with the (existing) contract, but there's no question that health care
was delivered better at the Kawartha Lakes facility and that integration
was better at the Kawartha Lakes facility," Kwinter said. "We have a
responsibility to make sure we provide adequate resources, and while
there's no question there were some benefits from this exercise that we
could learn from," he said. "The evidence clearly indicates that the
public facility produced better results." The province opened CNCC under
a private-public partnership after a Conservative overhaul of Ontario's
prison system in the 1990s. CECC opened soon after with the idea of
comparing the facilities based on cost effectiveness and performance.
Price Waterhouse Coopers, a consulting firm, conducted a comparison
review on CNCC and CECC for the province over an extended timeframe.
Part of that review shows the public prison rated higher than CNCC in
eight of 10 performance categories, including security and community
impact. CNCC spokesperson Peter Mount said he was surprised by the
decision of the government not to renew the company's contract and
called it “disappointing." “We will begin the process of talking to
staff right away,” said Mount, adding the U.S.-based company intends to
continue working with the province until its contract expires. "We have
a responsibility and we will continue to live up to that
responsibility," he said. "We will work closely with the government to
ensure safety is looked after." Simcoe North MPP Garfield Dunlop, who
has been a proponent of the private jail and who's also the Conservative
corrections critic, wasn’t thrilled by Thursday's announcement. “The
Liberals are in power and they have the ability to do this," he said.
"I’m going to live with the decision, but I just hope they’ll provide us
with the numbers.” In September of 2004, Dunlop estimated that having
the jail run by a private operator saved taxpayers more than $20 million
annually, according to financial figures he had seen at the time. "I
think there was a substantial savings there. I'd like them to show me in
black and white, without fudging the numbers, what it actually was," he
said. "That should be something that's available. What's to hide?" For
Penetanguishene resident Sharon Dion, an opponent of privatized prisons,
was pleased by the government's decision to go public. "It's an enormous
victory. I couldn't be more pleased. It's a great day for all
Canadians," said Dion, of Citizens Against Privatized Prisons. "I was a
little concerned at times about this review, but I think the
consultation was done in an honest manner on the government's part."
Kwinter said details still need to be ironed out, but the province plans
to provide 91 additional staff at the Penetanguishene prison when it
takes over in November.
April 27, 2006 The Star
Canada's only privately run jail is going public again. Ontario
Correctional Services Minister Monte Kwinter says an analysis of the
Penetanguishene prison showed it was saving the province money under
private operation. But Kwinter says there was a human cost. He says
health-care services weren't as good for prisoners, and offenders were
more likely to repeat. Kwinter says it will cost the province $2 million
more per year to run the 1,200-bed prison. The jail, north of Toronto,
went private under Ontario's previous Conservative government.
April 27, 2006 Government of Ontario
Ontario will transfer the operation of the Central North Correctional
Centre in Penetanguishene to the public sector, Community Safety and
Correctional Services Minister Monte Kwinter announced today. "After
five years, there has been no appreciable benefit from the private
operation of the Central North Correctional Centre," said Kwinter. "We
carefully studied its overall performance compared with the publicly
operated Central East Correctional Centre in Kawartha Lakes, and
concluded the CECC performed better in key areas such as security,
health care and reducing re-offending rates. As a result, the government
will allow the contract with the private operator to expire." Management
and Training Corporation Canada (MTCC) was chosen to operate the Central
North Correctional Centre in May 2001 as part of a five-year pilot
project. During that period, the Central East Correctional Centre -
which is identical in design - opened as a publicly operated facility.
The pilot project was to determine if there was any advantage to private
operations of correctional services in Ontario. "We acknowledge that
MTCC was in material compliance with the contract," said Kwinter, "but
the evidence clearly indicates that the public facility produced better
results in key performance areas." The contract with MTCC ends on
November 10, 2006. Over the next six months, the ministry will work with
its partners, including MTCC and bargaining agents, to ensure a safe and
smooth transition of CNCC's operations to the Ontario Public Service.
April 21, 2006 The Mirror
Once a staunch supporter of the privatization of the Central North
Correctional Centre in Penetanguishene, Simcoe North MPP Garfield Dunlop
now says he is not fighting to keep the jail privately operated, but
will accept whatever decision the Liberal government makes in May. "I'm
the guy in our caucus that wore the jail and I don't intend to go back
into that battle again," he told The Mirror. "If the government decides
to keep it private, then I will be fully supportive of the operator and
will do whatever I can to help them out. If the government decides to go
public, I will work with the public system and do my best." Dunlop says
he never felt supported by the provincial Conservatives when they were
in power, regarding the privatization of CNCC, but instead felt he was
left "carrying the full load" of the decision. "... I can't see myself,
once again, fighting very very hard to keep it private when I didn't get
a lot of support for privatization in the first place, particularly from
my party and even from the community, in a lot of ways," he said. "I
think that was fairly clear. I don't think that was any kind of a
mystery. No one came up and said that to me, but when privatization was
talked about, before the decision was made, I knew if there was a
privatized jail, I would get it because I'm the new guy down there. I
don't know anybody. That's just the way politics is." The MPP fought
hard to garner support for it, against the opposition of most of the
Penetanguishene council of the day and members of the community. "I
guess I do feel, a little bit to this day, a little let down that I
didn't get more support for privatization," said Dunlop, who noted that
many people supported the idea to him face to face, but would not go
public with their support.
March 10, 2006 The Mirror
Central North Correctional Centre employees worried about their fate
met secretly Wednesday night with OPSEU officials. "Rumours have been
circulating in the institution that if the public service takes over the
jail, all of these people are going to be out of work because the public
service correctional officers will come in and (take their jobs)," said
Don Ford, a spokesperson for the Ontario Public Services Employee Union,
who attended the meeting. Between 50 and 70 employees attended the
two-hour meeting, organized by members of OPSEU Local 369. Employees are
concerned about what will happen to them if the jail is made public, or
if the present contract is not renewed. Staffing levels continue to be a
concern for correctional officers at CNCC. Pete Wright, president of
OPSEU Local 368 at CECC, says the Lindsay prison - Penetanguishene's
physical twin except publicly operated - has 245 full-time and 80
part-time (called unclassifieds) COs. According to union representatives
at CNCC, Penetanguishene's prison has approximately 210 full-time and 30
part-time correctional officers. "A lot of the questions we got from the
members at Central North were operational questions as to how they
operate on a daily basis and how we operate," said Wright. "I think they
were shocked to hear some of the things that they take for granted that
we don't allow at Central East ... I think staffing levels are one of
the major concerns." Although Wright says violence is inherent at every
jail, it's usually offender on offender. He says Lindsay has not had any
murders at its facility (inmate Ming Tu was stabbed to death at CNCC)
and no correctional officers have been beaten, unlike the
Penetanguishene prison, where a correctional officer was severely beaten
in 2003 and another CO was stabbed in the neck by an inmate in 2005.
February 20, 2006 NUPGE
Correctional employees represented by the Ontario Public Service
Employees Union (OPSEU/NUPGE) are pressuring Liberal Premier Dalton
McGuinty to make good on a 2003 election promise to return the Ontario
superjail in Penetanguishene to the public sector. A petition, being
circulated by the union's ministry employee relations committee (MERC),
cites a litany of serious problems within the jail, which has been
operated since it opened in 2001 by an American company - Utah-based
Management and Training Corporation (MTC). The firm was granted a
five-year, $170-million contract to operate the 1,184-bed institution.
It is the first privately-run superjail anywhere in Canada. The deal was
negotiated, over widespread protests, by the former Conservative
government of Premier Mike Harris in 2001. It is due to expire later
this year unless renewed by the province. McGuinty pledged when he was
elected in October 2003 not to renew the contract. He also declared that
"private jails are a failed experiment and have no place in Ontario."
OPSEU says problems experienced under MTC management at the Central
North Correctional Centre in Penetanguishene include the following: • a
major riot due to lack of food, clothing and medical care, costing the
taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars in repairs; • the death of a
20-year-old due to lack of proper medical care; • four inmate stabbings,
an inmate murder and the beating of correctional officers, over period
of months - all caused by insufficient staffing levels; and • the loss
of $1.1-million a year in business taxes that the operators have been
exempted from paying to the municipality.
February 3, 2006 The Mirror
A former manager at the Central North Correctional Centre says he has
major concerns about the well-being of employees and inmates at the
jail. Former CNCC Sgt. Martin Speyer, 29, alleges inmates receives a
poor diet and medical care, and staff is bullied by senior management
inside Canada's only privately-run adult prison. Speyer was fired by
Management & Training Corporation (MTC) on Jan. 11, after being on
administrative leave since Dec. 20, 2005. In his dismissal letter, the
company alleges he was dishonest, he spoke negatively about the
institution in public, he negelected his duty; made misleading
statements; and was involved in a criminal act or negative behaviour.
Speyer refutes the allegations, saying he was, until October 2005,
considered a model employee - one who received numerous letters of
commendation and gratitude from prison officials, and was even
Correctional Officer of the Year during the first year of operation.
Speyer says it wasn't until he filed a complaint against another manager
in October 2005, and became more outspoken about employee issues that he
fell from grace. "They are bullied, absolutely bullied," he says. "They
are scared every day. When the staff come in, they are afraid of losing
their jobs. The key phrase that is used all the time there is, "I'm one
report away from being fired." Medical care is an issue at the jail that
has been highlighted in the media since it opened. (Medication) is not
done properly, pure and simple," says Speyer. "These guys are not
getting the medication they deserve. As a sergeant, I don't know how
many times my staff have been in situations where they have encountered
violence from an inmate that's acting out because they don't get proper
medication. Special dietary needs not being met is also a concern raised
by Speyer. Paula King, executive director of Elizabeth Fry in Simcoe
County, says the organization has had to advocate for pregnant women
whose dietary needs were not being met. "We have had to go to bat for
pregnant women who have not received the proper amounts of milk and
fresh fruit (as per ministry guidelines)," says King. Speyer first
became disenchanted with the organization during the American
Correctional Association accreditation process in September 2004, he
says. One of the most frequently cited reasons by correctional
facilities to seek accreditation is to demonstrate to interested parties
that the organization is operating at professional standards. When MTC
sought its accreditation, Speyer says he was in charge of making sure
the prison looked the way it was supposed to during the process,
organizing crews that worked steadily to make it look like the kitchen
and bathrooms had been regularly cleaned. "We had crews going through to
extra scrub the toilets (with drills that had scrub brushes on the end)
so they looked like they were scrubbed on a daily basis, although they
hadn't been touched (for a long time)." He says he and others were asked
by senior management to take cleaning chemicals, extra tools and extra
medical supplies out of the prison to ensure MTC met with ACA standards.
A letter dated Dec. 17, 2004 by then-acting facility administrator Phill
Clough, thanked Speyer for his 'above and beyond' commitment to the
accreditation, but the process was the biggest letdown Speyer had ever
felt in his professional life, he says. "It wasn't something that anyone
could say that they're proud of but...I believed from day one what it
(the accreditation) was supposed to be for. I believed that once we
achieved this certain standard that we weren't going to go back to the
old ways," he tells The Mirror. "So, when I was taking this stuff out of
the institution, I was thinking this is going to be that much better for
the staff. Then, once we had the accreditation on the wall, it went back
to how it was." Speyer has joined Citizens Against Private Prisons in
its fight to have the provincial government not renew MTC's contract,
which comes due in the fall of 2006. The government has to make its
decision by May.
February 1, 2006 The Mirror
A petition will soon be delivered to Queen's Park asking that Premier
Dalton McGuinty publicly promise to not renew the Management and
Training Corporation (MTC) contract at the Central North Correctional
Centre (CNCC) in Penetanguishene. Sharon Dion, chairperson of Citizens
Against Private Prisons, has created a petition that cites alleged
issues at the jail, including lack of food, clothing and medical care,
insufficient staffing levels; and MTC's exemption from paying the Town
of Penetanguishene business taxes. She expects about 15,000 signatures
once the petition becomes available electronically. She plans to give
the petition to Brant Liberal MPP Dave Levac - a vocal opponent of
private prisons - in March so he can present it in the Ontario
Legislature. McGuinty made promise not to renew jail contract at
Penetanguishene Council. When then-Opposition leader McGuinty visited
Penetanguishene Council with Levac, before the jail was open, he
promised that a Liberal government would not renew the contract with
Utah-based MTC. "We are trying to draw the attention of the Liberal
government so that they keep their promise," Dion said. "That's the
ultimate goal." Dion says she has received calls of support from
correctional officers at the Central East Correctional Centre (CECC) in
Lindsay and the Maplehurst Correctional Complex in Milton which are
publicly-operated. "Also, what's not included in the per diem rate is
all of the hidden costs of prison privatization, like ambulance and
hospital costs, escorts, and lawsuits that some inmates and their
families have against MTC, First Correctional Medical and the Province
of Ontario, in the case of Jeffrey Elliott's death."
December 30, 2005 The Free Press
Three of the four people charged in connection with the killing of an
inmate in 2004 at Central North Correctional Centre have pleaded guilty
to lesser charges. Minh Tu, 28, died the morning of May 5, 2004 at
Huronia District Hospital in Midland, two hours after being admitted
following an altercation in one of the living units at C.N.C.C. A
post-mortem examination determined Tu died as a result of a stab wound.
Tu was being held at the superjail on a warrant for extradition to the
United States where he had been facing drug charges. He had been at CNCC
for about two months prior to his murder.
December 16, 2005 The Mirror
A local woman has taken her fight to Queen's Park to have Central North
Correctional Centre publicly operated. Sharon Dion of Citizens Against
Private Prisons met with MPP Liz Sandals, parliamentary assistant to
Monte Kwinter, Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Services,
on Monday to discuss her concerns about Management and Training
Corporation. She also met with Brant MPP Dave Levac in a separate
meeting. Levac was the Liberal Opposition Critic for Corrections when
the Tories were in power and was a vocal opponent of the privatization
of the super jail in Penetanguishene. "My goal was to remind the
Liberal party of their promise to end the private prison culture in
Ontario," Dion told The Mirror. "I provided Ms. Sandals with
paperwork to enlighten her of the patterns and practices of the
documented mismanagement of MTC, both here and in the U.S." There
is one year left of the province's current five-year contract with MTC
but, as per contract stipulations, the government must decide by May
2006 whether to extend the contract for another year; extend the
contract up to five years, based on an agreement of financial terms;
re-tender the contract; or return the prison to the public service.
During the meeting with Sandals, Dion talked about inmate deaths,
violence and staff issues at the privately-run facility. "We talked
about the inadequate health care that caused the death of Jeffrey
Elliot, the stabbings, the murder, riot, staff safety, low staff levels
and high staff turnover, and (correctional officer) Dwight Stoneman's
brutal beating," she noted. Levac praised Dion for her
preparedness. "Sharon has been tenacious as always. What I love
about Sharon is she always comes prepared," he said, noting he's
hopeful the jail will become publicly operated. "She's factual.
She's not emotional about it. She brings passion to the situation but I
have to tell you that she's probably one of the most prepared people
I've ever dealt with and worked with."
November 16, 2005 The Mirror
The province will have to decide whether or not Management Training
Corporation (MTC) is meeting its service contract responsibilities, and
if it wants the Utah-based company to continue to run the Central North
Correctional Centre (CNCC), by May. There is one year left of the
current, five-year contract but as per contract stipulations, only six
months for the government to decide whether to extend the contract for
another year; extend the contract up to five years, based on an
agreement of financial terms; re-tender the contract; or return the
prison to the public service. According to Brian Low, Executive Lead,
Alternative Service Delivery with the Ministry of Community Safety and
Correctional Services, the contract decision-making process has begun
and will continue into the new year. Consultants from Price Waterhouse
Coopers will interview people from key groups to ensure the information
the government has is accurate. While members of Council, chamber of
commerce, board of monitors at the jail, and Ministry of Community
Safety and Correctional Services will be interviewed, members of
community groups, like Citizens Against Private Prisons, will not be
included. "It's disappointing they're not coming to speak to me
because I have been doing private prison research for five years and
it's important that this new government knows the character of the
company they're working with," said Sharon Dion, chairperson of
Citizens Against Private Prisons. "I have scathing reports about
Management and Training Corporation in the United States. This
government needs to know there are major problems with MTC in the United
States and First Correctional Medical who (also) runs our medical
unit." Low says the government already has information from Dion
and others who have made their views clear. Dion has been involved in
the debate for five years - even before the decision was made to run the
jail privately - and remembers a public promise made in 2001 by
then-Opposition leader, Dalton McGuinty, when he paid a visit to
Penetanguishene Council. "I want to make sure they uphold their
promise, that it's going back into public hands (if the Liberals come
into power)," she said, noting that she will soon meet with the
parliamentary assistant to Monte Kwinter, Minister of Community Safety
and Correctional Services, to discuss her findings, at Queen's Park.
When considering whether to extend the MTC contract, Dion wants the
government to take into consideration the deaths, violence, and one
instance where the wrong inmate was released, over the past four years.
But Low cautions that the incidents must be put in perspective.
August 19, 2005 The
Mirror
Property taxes topped the list of issues that members of Penetanguishene
Council talked about with the Minister of Community Safety and
Correctional Services at the AMO Conference this week. Council members
want Management and Training Corporation (MTC), the Utah-based company
that operates the Central North Correctional Centre (CNCC), to pay
property taxes, estimated at just over $1 million each year. Currently,
the town receives payment in lieu of taxes of $75 a bed - similar to
what government-run facilities such as hospitals and publicly-run jails
pay. "We don't think that's enough," said Deputy Mayor Randy
Robbins from the AMO Conference. "We've laid our cards on the table
of pursuing what every other business is doing in the province of
Ontario. They're not exempt from paying those property taxes. We'd like
to see them thrown into the real world with everybody else." While
this may be the first time council has officially talked to Monte
Kwinter about the issue, it's been an ongoing concern since the
provincial Conservative government announced it would seek a private
company to operate the jail. Of the approximate $1 million in property
taxes, about $660,000 would come to Penetanguishene while the remainder
would go to the County of Simcoe. "We tried to explain that if
Fuller Avenue needs to be rebuilt because of the traffic that the
facility is generating, we don't have that kind of money," said
Robbins. "We would like, if it's the choice of the ministry to go
with a contract extension (with MTC), that they pay taxes that we could
put into reserve for when those roads need to be rebuilt." The
possibility of the contract being extended with MTC was also a hot item
on the agenda during the 20-minute meeting on Monday. Robbins, along
with councillors Dan LaRose, Debbie Levy, Anne Murphy and Doug Leroux,
asked that the municipality have a seat at the table when the province
compares CNCC with the publicly-run jail in Lindsay and evaluates MTC's
performance.
August 17, 2005 Midland
Free Press
Correctional officers at the Central North
Correctional Centre are still on the job after voting 84 per cent in
favour of a new, four-year collective agreement on Friday. According to
OPSEU Local 369 bargaining team chairperson, Sean Wilson, the new
contract contains "99 per cent" of what the members wanted.
"We have an agreement on making sure we have breaks
to maintain our sanity in order to work there. Under the Health and
Safety Act, we've launched some processes to increase the staffing
levels," said Wilson, who couldn't go into further detail. "Once
they enshrine our breaks and stuff in the collective agreement they have
no choice but to increase the staffing levels in order to do that."
August 9, 2005 Newswire
Correctional officers
employed at Canada's only private adult jail will vote Aug. 12 on a
tentative agreement reached today at 9:30 a.m.
The bargaining team is recommending that the staff of Central
North Correctional Centre, members of the Ontario
Public Service Employees Union Local 369, ratify the agreement.
"This is a good deal for our members and we recommend it
unanimously," said Sean Wilson, chair of the
union bargaining team.
Details of the contract will be available after the ratification
vote is held. The previous contract expired on
Dec. 31, 2004.
August
5, 2005 The Mirror
If there is a strike at the Central North
Correctional Centre, members of Penetanguishene Council are satisfied
there is a plan in place to deal with it, says Mayor Anita Dubeau.
"Council was relatively satisfied that certainly there is a plan in
place," Dubeau told The Mirror. "I can't share the details
with you, but it did give council a good opportunity to ask the
necessary questions and (Management and Training Corporation) answered
as best they could." Most of Wednesday night's special meeting was
held in camera because staffing levels and security measures were
discussed. Council members and some residents have been concerned about
how the prison will continue its day-to-day operations safely if some
200 correctional officers walk off the job on Aug. 12. OPSEU has
confirmed that they are going back to the mediation table with MTC on
Monday, Aug. 8. "Less than 50 MTC managers are available to replace
200 striking correctional officers," Sean Wilson, chairperson of
the union bargaining team, said in a press release.
August
3, 2005 The Mirror
A Penetanguishene resident says she believes
members of municipal council should be apprised of the procedures and
policies that will be involved in securing the Central North
Correctional Facility, in the event of a strike by OPSEU correctional
officers on Aug. 11. Sharon Dion, the Canadian liaison for The Private
Corrections Institute in Florida and chairperson of Citizens Against
Private Prisons, has expressed her concerns about the safety of the
community in a letter to council, dated July 26. "There seems to be
many unanswered questions regarding who will be securing the facility in
the event of a strike. The ministry's office advised me the issue would
be dealt with between (Management and Training Corporation) and the
union. On the contrary, union representatives have stated that no public
service workers will be utilized during a strike," wrote Dion.
Although he expresses similar concerns, Deputy Mayor Randy Robbins said
he is not sure what council can do. "Sure, we are (concerned about
the possible strike)," Robbins told The Mirror, before he had an
opportunity to read the letter. "We've been through a few strikes
with OPSEU with the mental health centre and it's always a concern. Not
knowing the contingency plan heightens that concern. We'll have to see.
It's not as if we can send our people up there. What can we do?"
But Dion wants assurances the plan will be implemented
properly. "I do understand the importance of not making public
staffing numbers for security reasons, but due to the fact that this
American company does not have other institutions in Canada to draw
upon, (it) could jeopardize the safety of our community."
August
3, 2005 The Mirror
It's difficult for Dwight to remember exactly what
happened on Dec. 17, 2003, after he was beaten by an inmate at the
Central North Correctional Centre. "I just turned slightly with my
body to say (to the inmate), 'There's the door,' and when I did, I don't
remember anything else for probably three or four minutes," said
the correctional officer, hesitating slightly to gather his thoughts - a
side effect from the severe beating he received. "During that time,
I was taking all kinds of hits to the body and the head. I was basically
blacked out but standing up; I hadn't fallen to the ground. There was a
point at which I came to. Part of me, almost a primal instinct type of
thing, told me to stay up or you're going to die, and I thought I was
having a massive heart attack." According to Dwight, that day he
was teamed up with a new female correctional officer on her first day of
work in Unit 1, while a third officer was pulled off the unit to work
elsewhere. Another officer was stationed inside the control pod. While
Dwight went into the unit alone to approach the inmate, who would not go
into his cell as directed, his partner stayed outside the locked unit,
as is correct procedure. But Dwight says there should have been more
officers in the unit. "There shouldn't have been just the two of
us. There should have been probably four or five and this is the
shortcomings of private prisons," said the 57 year old, who was a
police officer for 34 years with Toronto Police Service and the OPP
before coming to CNCC as a correctional officer. "They've got to
economize some way and there's only so many paper clips you can save.
The only other area you can cut back on is either meals or the officers
on duty."
It's incidents like this - and the
stabbing of a correctional officer three times in the neck by an inmate
several weeks ago - that union officials say prove higher staff levels
and tighter security measures need to be in their new collective
agreement. The previous contract expired Dec. 31, 2004. Correctional
officers voted 95 per cent in favour of rejecting an offer by Management
and Training Corporation Canada (MTCC), the Utah-based company that
operates the private prison. More than 88 per cent of the correctional
officers turned out to vote on July 21. Unlike
correctional officers in the Ontario Public Service who cannot strike
because they are covered by the Crown Employee Collective Bargaining
Act, which requires that a negotiated essential services agreement be in
place prior to a labour disruption, CNCC officers can go on strike if
they do not reach a collective agreement. MTC and its employees are
covered under the Labour Relations Act, which has no legislative
requirement for an essential services agreement.
August 3, 2005 OPSEU
Correctional officers employed at Canada’s only
private adult jail will walk off the job at 12:01 a.m. Aug. 12 if no
agreement is reached for a new collective agreement, says the Ontario
Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU/NUPGE). On July 21, members of
OPSEU Local 369 voted 95% to reject the last offer made by Utah-based
Management and Training Corporation, the company hired by the former
Conservative government of Premier Mike Harris to run the institution.
OPSEU President Leah Casselman says wage issues have been mostly agreed
upon. However, issues such as staffing levels and time off remain
outstanding. “Our members are still looking for parity with their
public sector counterparts,” Casselman says. “We will not allow this
American company to run the jail at standards that are below jails in
the rest of the province.” Unlike publicly-operated jails, there is no
law requiring members to provide essential services during a strike or
lockout. Sean Wilson, chair of the union bargaining team, says this
should be a concern for both the jail and the community. “Less
than 50 MTC managers are available to replace 200 striking correctional
officers,” Wilson adds. “There aren’t any trained teams available
to deal with riots or other disturbances should they arise.”
July 13, 2005
Bargaining representatives for the Ontario Public Service Employees
Union Local 369 at the Penetanguishene private superjail have
recommended that their members vote to reject the final offer tabled by
the employer today, July 13. The contract offer affects over 200
correctional staff at the facility. OPSEU
members will vote on the employer offer on July 21. A rejection will
give the union a strike mandate, and a strike date is expected to be set
for mid-August. The previous contract expired Dec. 31, 2004.
OPSEU President Leah Casselman said that the contract offer
doesn't come anywhere close to what her members need in their next
collective agreement: Parity
with public sector correctional workers. Currently,
workers at the facility run by Utah-based Management and Training
Corporation earn two per cent less per hour than their public sector
counterparts and receive fewer benefits and less time off. Sean Wilson,
chair of
the union bargaining team, says this is unacceptable.
July 8, 2005 Simcoe.com
JAIL GUARD STABBED - OPP charged an inmate at the Central North Correctional
Centre in Penetanguishene after an attack in a staircase. Police said, on
Monday, June 27, a 22-year-old correctional officer was grabbed by an inmate,
and stabbed in the neck with a sharpened object. The officer was able to run
away and went into a secured area. Another officer was threatened with death
before the inmate calmed down. An 18-year-old Brampton man was arrested and
charged with attempted murder, assaulting a peace officer, threatening death and
breach of probation.
May 27, 2005 Midland
Free Press
As a wrongful death suit slowly makes its way
through the courts, Tom Elliott believes the privately operated jail in
which his son contracted blood poisoning should become a public
institution. Elliott's son, Jeffrey, died from blood poisoning in August
2003, after cutting his hand on a food hatch at the Central North
Correctional Centre in Penetanguishene. The 1,184 bed facility is
operated by Management and Training Corporation (MTC) of Canada, and
it's parent company based in Centerville, Utah. In September, a
coroner's inquest ruled the 20-year-old Beachburg man died accidentally.
Elliott and his family are seeking $150,000 in damages in a wrongful
death suit launched against the Province of Ontario, MTC and First
Correctional Medical. Elliott said he is unwilling to negotiate a
settlement with the three parties. "It is not a money issue.
I'm not concerned about money," he said. "I
will settle for nothing less than a public apology, to let the public
know that this wasn't right." "There is no money to be gained
out of this," Elliott added. "I want to make the public
understand that it could be their son or daughter."
May 20,
2005 Midland Free Press
Central North Correctional Centre was locked down
this week after a bullet was found Saturday in a washroom at the jail.
The washroom where staff found the bullet was located in the front
administration area of the prison. "It's obviously a strange place
to find a bullet," said correctional officer Sean Wilson, president
of OPSEU Local 369, which represents more than 200 guards. "The one
thought is, if there's a bullet, is there a gun?" Guards issued a
work refusal Saturday and a Ministry of Labour inspector was summoned.
Ministry spokesperson Bruce Skeaff said the first work refusal was aired
Saturday morning. That’s when a bullet and razors were found inside
the prison, though he was unable to provide a location for where the
razors were discovered. The jail was locked down — and remained so at
press time — by the employer as the work refusal unfolded. A ministry
inspector determined the workers had no right to issue the work refusal
and the situation was downgraded to a complaint. A search was ordered,
and the inspector advised that staff be instructed and trained by the
employer to do such.
May 18,
2005 The Mirror
A bullet and razors were found at the jail in Penetanguishene, but no gun has yet been located. Inmates at the Central
North Correctional Center remained in lockdown yesterday as correctional
officers searched for a gun believed to be hidden within the jail. On
Saturday May 14, a bullet and razors were found in a washroom at the
Penetanguishene jail, and correctional officers believed the bullet
wouldn't be there without a pistol. Correctional officers asked for the
jail to be locked down until the gun was found, but The Mirror was told
management refused. "We were called at 11a.m. with a work refusal
by 275 correctional officers at the facility," said Bruce Skeaff,
ministry of labour spokesperson. "It was a disagreement between the
workers and management in regards to the search of the facility."
May 17,
2005 Midland Free Press
Management and Training Corporation jettisoned
the word 'acting' before Phill Clough's title earlier this month as he
was named the new administrator at Central North Correctional Centre. Clough
had been acting facility administrator since former jail boss Doug
Thomson — who'd run the prison since July 2001, four months before
CNCC opened its doors to inmates — resigned last November.
March 18,
2005 Midland Free Press
Tom Elliott continues to seek justice for his dead son Jeffrey. A
pretrial has been scheduled
for the end of April for the $150,000 wrongful death suit launched by
the Elliott family against the Province of Ontario, Management and
Training Corporation (MTC) of Canada, and First Correctional Medical.
The purpose of a pretrial is to bring the parties together to discuss
the case and the issues to be presented in court. The lawsuit was filed
months before the jury in the Ontario coroner’s inquest ruled in
September that Jeffery Elliott died accidentally while at the Central
North Correctional Centre in Penetanguishene. The 20-year-old Beachburg
man died from blood poisoning in August 2003, after cutting his hand on
a food hatch at the jail operated by MTC, a private company based in
Centerville, Utah. Jeffery had less than a month remaining on his
one-year robbery sentence when he died. “I still stick by the same
thing. It’s not a money issue it’ about principle,” said Mr.
Elliott, explaining why he launched the lawsuit. “It was obvious in
Jeffery’s case it was a lack of treatment (that caused his death).
It was a tragedy.” Elliott said he would
agree to withdraw his lawsuit if the jail was placed in public hands.
February
25, 2005 Midland Free Press
One inmate has his ear
ripped off and another was stabbed several times with a three-inch screw
nail in separate incidents, Saturday at Central North Correctional
Centre, according to prison sources. Sources said the first altercation
was prolonged because of a computer failure in the unit which prevented
the doors from opening, forcing the crisis team to take the long way
around. The first incident, which happened midday, was an
inmate-on-inmate fight, and one of the prisoners "had his ear
ripped right off," said a correctional officer who requested
anonymity. Computer problems have plagued the prison for months and have
led to work refusals by guards, citing their safety was compromised. The
officer said the recent failure was isolated to one unit, adding staff
are becoming increasingly frustrated by door and computer malfunctions.
The Free Press recently reported that the ministry had paid for computer
upgrades. "The computers being fixed, that's a crock," said
the guard. "They give us all kinds of excuses. It's obvious we've
got big-time problems." The second incident happened Saturday
evening when about 32 inmates were being escorted from the chapel back
to their unit. A fight erupted and one of the prisoners used a screw
nail as a weapon, said the guard. One of the inmates sustained
"several" puncture wounds to the head, chest and side, said
the officer, who estimated the screw nail was about three inches long
and about 3/8 of an inch thick. They said the inmate was treated in the
prison medical unit.
February
15, 2005 Midland Free Press
Work refusals by
correctional officers last year at Central North Correctional Centre
were not the catalyst for the installation of new computer hardware and
software, says a ministry official. Julia Noonan, spokesperson for the
Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services' corrections
branch, confirmed there were computer upgrades at CNCC just before
Christmas. The local prison was plagued by computer malfunctions last
fall, including a crash that reduced central control to half-capacity
and led to a prisonwide lockdown. At the time, guards said this created
a dangerous scenario in the admission and discharge area. Other maladies
included door and interlock failures, intercom glitches, as well as loss
of camera control, audio alarms and duress signal failures.
December
7, 2004 Midland Free Press
An inquest into the death of
a Central North Correctional Centre inmate begins Dec. 13 at the Midland
courthouse. Joseph Balog, 20, of Barrie, collapsed
Sept.29, 2003, within three hours of arriving at the Penetanguishene
jail. He was taken to
Huronia District Hospital where he died two hours later.
November
29, 2004 Midland Free Press
A correctional officer at Central North Correctional Centre was arrested
Sunday and charged with drug-trafficking and breach of peace for
allegedly selling cocaine and marijuana inside the so-called superjail.
This is the second guard this year to face drug-related charges.
Following a year-long investigation, Southern Georgian Bay OPP arrested
the guard Sunday at around noon, said Const. Greg Chinn. A
37-year-old Oro-Medonte Township man has been charged with trafficking a
controlled substance and breach of peace. The arrest marks the second
time this year that a guard has been charged with a drug-related
offence. In March, a 29-year-old correctional officer from
Penetanguishene was arrested on his way to work by the OPP and charged
with drug trafficking, breach of trust and threatening after a
month-long investigation by the provincial crime unit. However, ministry
spokesperson Tony Brown said it's up to Management and Training
Corporation — the Utah-based company that has a five-year contract to
run the jail — to deal with the situation.
November
19, 2004 Midland Free Press
The Free Press has learned that a recent work refusal issued by a
correctional worker cites more computer problems at the superjail, but a
Ministry of Labour inspector deemed it did not pose immediate danger to
the guards. The work refusal was issued by a correctional officer in the
early morning hours of Nov. 4. Ministry
of Labour spokesperson Belinda Sutton said the work refusal was called
in after three alleged computer crashes the night before, and
correctional officers said it posed a threat to their safety.
Sharon Dion, a member of the prison's Community Monitoring Committee and
an advocate for the abolishment of private prisons in Canada, said she
is at her wit's end regarding continual defects within the jail.
"This is absolutely ridiculous," said Dion. "If
(Management and Training Corporation) cared about its correctional
officers, they'd deal with this promptly."
November 9,
2004 Midland Free Press
The first and only administrator to oversee Central North Correctional
Centre has resigned. Effective last Friday, Doug Thomson resigned his
post as facility administrator at the so-called superjail. Thomson
started his career in 1979, as a correctional officer in Ottawa, moving
around the province to other facilities. He was promoted through the
ranks until eventually becoming a superintendent. Thomson was hired by
Utah-based Management and Training Corporation to head up CNCC, Canada's
first privately run adult prison. He began the job in July 2001, and the
jail opened in November 2001.
October
29, 2004 Midland Free Press
This is in response to
Management & Training Corporation's diatribe ("MTC defends
accreditation," Oct. 22, 2004) about Brian Dawe's Oct 15
"Letter of the Day" questioning the American Correctional
Association (ACA) accreditation of MTC's Central North Correctional
Centre (CNCC). MTC's Peter Mount
never addressed any of the points Mr. Dawe raised.
Instead, Mr. Mount resorted to a personal assault on Mr. Dawe and
his organization, Corrections USA. Not
once did Mr. Mount defend the credibility or the significance of ACA's
accreditation. Why didn't Mr.
Mount just present evidence to counter the claims that:
* ACA has never
failed an institution, during an accreditation audit?
* ACA refuses to
release the results of its audits? *
ACA ensures that positions on its board and committees are filled
with for-profit private prison operators?
* ACA has accredited
some facilities in the United States that have later been sites of
excessive staff-on-inmate violence? In
January 2004, Abt Associates released a report for the U.S. Department
of Justice called "Government's Management of Private
Prisons." This report
says the following about ACA accreditation:
Achieving ACA accreditation is not an outcomes-based performance
goal. Rather, ACA standards
primarily prescribe procedures.
(Emphasis in original) The great majority of ACA standards are
written in this form: "The
facility shall have written policies and procedures on ..."
The standards emphasize the important benefits of procedural
regularity and effective administration control that flow from written
procedures, and careful documentation of practices and events.
But, for the most part, the standards prescribe neither the goals
that ought to be achieved nor the indicators that would let officials
know if they are making progress toward those goals over time.
I guess now Mr. Mount will be calling the Abt and the U. S.
Department of Justice zealots. However,
it is nice to know that if there is a riot at the CNCC, MTC may have the
paperwork to show it has had a riot. In
full disclosure and before Mr. Mount attacks my commitment to the fight
against for-profit private prisons, I am the executive director of the
Private Corrections Institute, an advocacy group that presents the
"other side" of the story on private prisons.
Don't take my word about the horrors associated with profiteering
of the incarceration of human beings. PCI
backs up its claims with documentation, without resorting to character
assassination. Ken Kopczynski, Private Corrections Institute
October 22,
2004 Midland Free Press
A jackknife was discovered in Unit 2 at Central North Correctional
Centre, Sunday afternoon, according to a prison employee. Prison
spokesperson Peter Mount could not confirm whether a weapon had been
found. A union representative and correctional officer inside CNCC, who
requested anonymity, said the discovery of weapons is growing tiresome
and dangerous. “Obviously we have a problem,” said the correctional
officer. “They (management) are finally admitting there is a problem,
which has taken about three years.” A
few weeks ago, correctional officers found a pocketknife after two
inmates were stabbed last month. Another inmate was stabbed to death in
May. Fear of weapons in Unit 6 ultimately led to a work refusal.
Due to the possible dangers, correctional officers issued their second
work refusal in two weeks. On Oct. 7, correctional officers issued a
work refusal after the central control computer was reduced to
half-capacity; guards also had concerns that duress signals in some of
the living units may not have worked properly had there been an
emergency while the main computer was down. With
the recent concerns over possible weapons in Unit 6, union
representatives and management could not come to an agreement about how
to solve the problem, so a Ministry of Labour health and safety
inspector was called in. The Ministry of Labour inspector ordered
that Unit 6 be searched thoroughly. A
ministry memo states, “The employer should take every reasonable
precaution to protect the (health and safety) of a worker. The employer’s
operating procedures require a mandatory once-every-two-weeks search of
the inmate living areas. This order applies to Unit 6.”
Correctional officers have repeatedly told management there needs to be
regular searches every two weeks, not monthly, as has been happening.
Belinda Sutton, a Ministry of Labour spokesperson, said the memo
essentially reinforced the jail’s existing policy. “The
employer already had the search policy of once every two weeks in place,”
said Sutton. “The Ontario Ministry of Labour issued an order for the
employer to follow its own internal procedure.” The prison’s
biweekly search policy is “adequate,” said Mount, though he would
not comment further on how often searches are actually conducted, citing
potential security risks.
October 15,
2004 Daily Observer
The family of a 20-year-old Beachburg man who died after sustaining a
cut to his hand while serving time in Canada's only private jail is
suing the company that operates the institution and the province for
$150,000. Jeffrey
Elliott's estate, his father Tom Elliott and his grandmother Elizabeth
Elliott, are each seeking $50,000 in general damages from Management and
Training Corporation Canada and the provincial government.
October 15,
2004 Midland Free Press
Central North Correctional Centre underwent a prisonwide lockdown last
Thursday after the jail’s main computer was reduced to half-capacity.
A malfunction to the prison’s central control computer system —
believed to be caused by faulty hard drives — led to a work refusal by
correctional officers. The
failure made for an unsafe environment in the admission and discharge
area where about 40 prisoners were waiting entrance to the prison.
According to sources representing union interests inside the jail, only
two of central control’s four computers were operational. The
malfunction meant opening and closing of doors inside the prison would
be slowed substantially, said the correctional officer. The crash also
put added stress on officers in central control area. At that point a
work refusal was issued, they said. “They fix things fairly quickly
when there’s a work refusal,” said the correctional officer. This
is not a new problem, however. Both mechanical and technical glitches
have been ongoing for about six months, said the correctional officer.
Six work refusals have been issued in the past at the so-called
superjail. Other work refusals were issued due to inadequate searches
and sub-par staffing levels.
October 13,
2004 Midland Mirror
Another inmate has been stabbed at the Central North Correctional
Centre.
On Oct.9, a 21-year-old man was sent to the Huronia District
Hospital after he was stabbed several times in his upper body, at
approximately 8:30 a.m. This is the third stabbing at the jail
this year. An incident in
May resulted in death, and a stabbing occurred last month.
Peter Mount, communications director at the Central North
Correctional Centre, said jail isn't releasing any details and is
completing its own investigation.
When asked by The Mirror if the super jail is a safe place, Mount
said there is no way to measure that. "There's no qualitative
measure of what's safe." While Mount said administration has a good
relationship with correctional officers, he did confirm there was a
'refusal-to-work' situation last week.
October 10,
2004 VRLand News
The
O.P.P. are investigating another stabbing at Canada's only privately
operated prison.
At the C.N.C.C. facility in Penetanguishene, a
21-year old inmate was stabbed several times.
September 29,
2004 The Mirror
At Monday night's council meeting, Midland Police Chief Paul Hamelin
told council the prevalence of crack cocaine in the community is on the
rise, and he attributed it to the Penetanguishene jail. "Our
intelligence officer reports that we are beginning to see a correlation
between criminal activity in our community, and the Central North
Correctional Centre," said Hamelin. Through investigating cases of
crack cocaine and other drugs in the community, Hamelin has been in
contact with officers in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), and said they
have been able to trace some of those cases back to the jail. Hamelin
said he never guessed crime within Midland would be on the increase as a
result of the jail, which opened in 2001. "This is not something we
anticipated with the jail. In the beginning, there were more concerns of
(inmates) moving to this area, much like you see in the federal
system."
September 25,
2004 Toronto Sun
AFTER 24 hours of deliberations, a coroner's jury decided that the death
of inmate Jeffrey Elliott was accidental, but the young man's father
says he does not agree with the verdict. The decision, along with 11
recommendations, came after a two-week inquest that explored the details
behind the death of the 20-year-old Beachburg man. Elliott
died a painful death last year from blood poisoning after a small cut on
his finger became horribly infected. Most of the recommendations
were directed at Canada's only privately run prison, the Central North
Correction Centre (CNCC) in Penetanguishene, where Elliott was serving a
one-year sentence. The jury asked for more stringent hygiene methods,
better medical record keeping and better education and treatment of hand
infections.
September
21, 2004 The Star
By the time an inmate at Canada's first privately run jail was sent to a
hospital, a tiny cut on his finger had become so seriously infected a
lot of the fat and tissue had been destroyed, an inquest has heard.
"The long tendons to the finger had also been eaten away by
the pus,'' Dr. James Lacey, a plastic surgeon who operated on Jeffrey
Elliott, told the inquest in Midland yesterday.
Elliott, 20, cut his finger on the food hatch in the door of a
fellow inmate's cell at the Central North Correctional Centre in
Penetanguishene on Aug. 1, 2003. He died Aug. 29, 2003, of an acute
gastrointestinal hemorrhage resulting from septic complications of a
hand injury. By Aug. 9, Elliott's wound was seeping pus, indicating it
was "in an advanced stage" of tenosynovitus, a serious
infection of the tendons. But a doctor didn't see him until two days
later, the jury heard.
September 16, 2004 Toronto Sun
Three days after a deadly infection began to spread its way through
inmate Jeffrey Elliott's body, he needed emergency care. Instead, an
inquest heard yesterday, prison medical staff pumped a multitude of
antibiotics into him for three weeks, which may have contributed to his
slow, ugly death last year. "They missed the boat ... he needed
urgent emergency care and he didn't get it," Dr. Paul Binhammer, a
hand surgeon at Sunnybrook hospital, told a coroner's inquest in Midland
yesterday. He said medical staff at Central North Correctional Centre in
Penetanguishene, Canada's only privately run prison, didn't heed obvious
signs of the deadly infection that killed Elliott. Three
days after the prison doctor put two stitches in his finger on Aug. 1,
2003, he stuck his swollen hand out of his cell hatch to show a passing
nurse. He complained again a few days later. Both times he was given
Tylenol and ice.
September 14, 2004 Ottawa Citizen
After Day 1 of an inquest into the death of Jeffrey Elliott, it remains
unclear just how the 20-year-old acquired a cut on his finger that ended
in his blood poisoning death. Mr. Elliott, an inmate at Canada's first
privately run corrections facility, died in Mount Sinai Hospital in
Toronto on Aug. 29, 2003, four weeks after sustaining the cut on the
inside of his right-hand ring finger. Mr.
Elliott had only 23 days left on a robbery sentence in the controversial
Central North Correctional Centre in Pentetanguishene, called the
"super-jail." The outcome of the inquest may have a bearing on
the future of Canada's first and only privately run corrections centre.
U.S.-based Management Training Company (MTC) is contracted by the
Ontario government to run the facility. Dr. Moran, a Barrie
doctor who visits the facility on Fridays, was at the correctional
centre on the day Mr. Elliott sustained the cut. Crown attorney David
Russell questioned the doctor's report, which states silk sutures were
used for the wound, a series of questions that went on for about an
hour. "The jail has never had silk sutures," Dr. Moran told
the inquest, unable to provide an explanation for the mixup.
September 10, 2004 Midland Free Press
Following a pair of stabbings at Central North Correctional Centre, an
anonymous correctional officer at the superjail said a lockdown and
subsequent search yielded a pocketknife, the same week a report was
leaked to the media about modicum staffing levels. Because of staff
shortages, searches aren't performed as regularly as they should be,
said the correctional officer. At
least one anti-privatization supporter says the memo should open the
public's eyes once and for all about staffing levels inside the jail.
"The words come straight from one of their administrators,"
said Sharon Dion, head of Citizens Against Private Prisons
Penetanguishene, and a member of the prison's community advisory
committee. "If it's a concern to them it should be a community
concern. The
OPP is investigating a pair of stabbings that happened last Saturday at
CNCC. A 21-year-old Toronto man received a puncture wound to his leg,
and a 20-year-old man, also from Toronto, sustained a puncture wound to
his chest and a cut on his thumb.
September 3, 2004 Midland Free
Press
A
draft internal memo says staffing issues makes scheduling a nightmare
and that the Central North Correctional Centre is not in compliance with
its contract with the province. The
internal draft memo from deputy of operations Phil Clough to
superintendent Doug Thomson said staffing issues mean shift scheduling
"doesn't meet the needs community escorts, particularly when they
are admitted to hospital." A guard and union spokesman from
the publically-run Superjail near Lindsay compared the Superjail to the
Titanic. Barry Scanlon, a guard at the publicly run superjail in
Maplehurst, and representative of the Ontario Public Service Employees
Union, said the institution was "ripe for disaster."Chronic
understaffing at Ontario's privately run superjail has led to inadequate
supervision of the maximum-security institution and of inmates escorted
into the community, the internal document suggests. Clough also wrote
that trying to schedule shifts properly was "an exercise in
futility," raising concerns over public safety.
"The present shift schedule...doesn't meet the needs of
community escorts, particularly when they are admitted to
hospital." Critics
seized on the confidential review of staffing levels as proof that
Utah-based Management and Training Corporation which operates the
1,200-bed Central North Correctional Centre was putting profits before
public safety. When
the former Tory government announced the new jail would be privately
operated, it assuaged community fears by promising tough standards a
private operator would have to meet. Those
standards - including minimum staffing levels - were enshrined in a
contract between the company and the province that runs to 2006.
However, the memo obtained by the union two weeks ago and
apparently written at the end of May or in early June, indicates the
company had failed to live up to its end of the deal.
"On a regular basis, we are not in compliance with the
contract," it says bluntly. Dan Gregoire, a former guard at the
jail, accused the company of failing to come clean with the government
and public. "Please, for the
safety of the community, the inmates and for the staff...it's time to
remove this private operator," said Gregoire.
Four people have died during their custody period at CNCC since
May of 2003. A recent trail
into the attack on an inmate in the prison yielded no convictions,
despite the attack taking place in the facility during a snack period
for the inmates. The victim was
yanked out of the food lineup with a pillowcase over his head and
dragged to a cell, where he was stabbed more than 30 times with the
sharpened end of a pink toothbrush. He
was also kicked, choked and beaten.
His legs were placed over the bunk and jumped on by two or three
other inmates, leaving him with broken ribs and ankles, a concussion and
multiple stab wounds.
September 3, 2004 Midland Free
Press
A
draft internal memo says staffing issues makes scheduling a nightmare
and that the Central North Correctional Centre is not in compliance with
its contract with the province. The
internal draft memo from deputy of operations Phil Clough to
superintendent Doug Thomson said staffing issues mean shift scheduling
"doesn't meet the needs community escorts, particularly when they
are admitted to hospital." A guard and union spokesman from
the publically-run Superjail near Lindsay compared the Superjail to the
Titanic. Barry Scanlon, a guard at the publicly run superjail in
Maplehurst, and representative of the Ontario Public Service Employees
Union, said the institution was "ripe for disaster."Chronic
understaffing at Ontario's privately run superjail has led to inadequate
supervision of the maximum-security institution and of inmates escorted
into the community, the internal document suggests. Clough also wrote
that trying to schedule shifts properly was "an exercise in
futility," raising concerns over public safety.
"The present shift schedule...doesn't meet the needs of
community escorts, particularly when they are admitted to
hospital." Critics
seized on the confidential review of staffing levels as proof that
Utah-based Management and Training Corporation which operates the
1,200-bed Central North Correctional Centre was putting profits before
public safety. When
the former Tory government announced the new jail would be privately
operated, it assuaged community fears by promising tough standards a
private operator would have to meet. Those
standards - including minimum staffing levels - were enshrined in a
contract between the company and the province that runs to 2006.
However, the memo obtained by the union two weeks ago and
apparently written at the end of May or in early June, indicates the
company had failed to live up to its end of the deal.
"On a regular basis, we are not in compliance with the
contract," it says bluntly. Dan Gregoire, a former guard at the
jail, accused the company of failing to come clean with the government
and public. "Please, for the
safety of the community, the inmates and for the staff...it's time to
remove this private operator," said Gregoire.
Four people have died during their custody period at CNCC since
May of 2003. A recent trail
into the attack on an inmate in the prison yielded no convictions,
despite the attack taking place in the facility during a snack period
for the inmates. The victim was
yanked out of the food lineup with a pillowcase over his head and
dragged to a cell, where he was stabbed more than 30 times with the
sharpened end of a pink toothbrush. He
was also kicked, choked and beaten.
His legs were placed over the bunk and jumped on by two or three
other inmates, leaving him with broken ribs and ankles, a concussion and
multiple stab wounds.
September 1,
2004 The Star
Understaffing at Ontario's only privately run jail means the facility's
U.S. operators are routinely violating their contract with the province,
a confidential company document says. The internal memo, prepared
by company officials at the Central North Correctional Centre in
Penetanguishene, highlights serious problems resulting from
understaffing and concludes: "We are in a situation where on a
regular basis we are not in compliance with the contract."
The memo says the prison, which opened in 2001 and is run by Management
Training Corp. of Utah, has too few staff to protect the public properly
when prisoners leave the prison. It states the "present shift
schedule ... is not meeting needs, is inefficient, has staff on shift
where they are not needed and insufficient staff where they are, doesn't
meet the needs of community escorts particularly when (inmates) are
admitted to hospital." The memo also says there was not even
enough staff to provide proper searches to keep drugs and weapons out of
the maximum-security jail.
August 31,
2004 The Star
Chronic understaffing at Ontario's privately run superjail has led to
inadequate supervision of the maximum-security institution and of
inmates escorted into the community, an internal document
suggests. Critics seized on the confidential review of staffing
levels as proof that Utah-based Management and Training Corp., which
operates the 1,200-bed Central North Correctional Centre in
Penetanguishene, was putting profits before public safety. The
memo, written by the jail's deputy of operations Phill Clough to its
superintendent Doug Thomson, outlines numerous problems at the
three-year-old facility. "Searches are not being done in a
systemic manner," the memo states. Clough also wrote that
trying to schedule shifts properly was "an exercise in
futility," raising concerns over public safety. "The
present shift schedule doesn't meet the needs of community escorts,
particularly when they are admitted to hospital." Barry
Scanlon, a guard at the publicly run superjail in Maplehurst, Ont., and
representative of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, said the
institution was "ripe for disaster." "We don't want
(guards) coming out in bodybags," said Scanlon. "Central
North Correctional Centre Titanic is what it is. It's just waiting for
that iceberg to come up." When the former Tory government
announced the new jail north of Toronto would be privately operated, it
assuaged community fears by promising tough standards a private operator
would have to meet. Those standards — including minimum staffing
levels — were enshrined in a contract between the company and the
province that runs to 2006. However, the memo obtained by the
union two weeks ago and apparently written at the end of May or in early
June, indicates the company had failed to live up to its end of the
deal. "On a regular basis, we are not in compliance with the
contract," it says bluntly. "We have everything in place
to address any compliance issues as they emerge," said Adrian
Dafoe. Still, New Democrat Peter Kormos accused management of the
facility of "recklessly and consciously risking public
safety," and called on the province to take over the prison
immediately. While no inmates have managed to flee the facility,
in August 2002, rioting erupted at the institution and almost 100
inmates almost escaped using a battering ram. There have been
about four or five deaths, including one who was knifed and another who
died from medical problems caused by a cut on his hand. Kormos
accused management of the facility of "recklessly and consciously
risking public safety" and called on the province to take over the
prison immediately. "It's become obvious that the private
prison experience has been a total failure," Kormos said. Dan
Gregoire, a former guard at the jail, accused the company of failing to
come clean with the government and public. "Please, for the
safety of the community, the inmates and for the staff it's time to
remove this private operator," said Gregoire.
July 9, 2004 Midland
Free Press
Three men charged with severely beating a fellow inmate at the Central
North Correctional Centre in Penetanguishene were found not guilty
Thursday. The jury at the trial got a glimpse of life behind the
high-wire fence of the so-called superjail. During the four-day
trial, which started June 30 in the Superior Court of Justice in Barrie,
the nine-woman, three-man jury was told that the victim Thomas Smuck,
was savagely beaten while serving time in the superjail for sexual
assault and forcible confinement. His attackers grabbed him
while he lined up for the evening snack - called jug-up - on April 27,
2002. They covered his head with a pillow case and as he passed in and
out of consciousness dragged him into a cell where they stabbed him 47
times with a filed-down toothbrush. Smuck told the court he didn't
know who his assailants were, but one sat on his chest while another
punched him in the face. Then, with his feet hanging over the edge
of the bed, another jumped repeatedly on his legs and broke both of his
ankles.
May 20, 2004 Barrier
Examiner
Four inmates at the Central North Correctional Centre were charged
Wednesday in connection with the death of another inmate earlier this
month. Minh Tu, 28, died from a stab wound on May 5. Police
continue to investigate the death of Tu, the fourth inmate to die at the
prison, commonly referred to as the superjail, in the last year.
Inquests have yet to be held to examine the deaths of two other
inmates.
May 11,
2004 Midland Free Press
Minh Tu has been identified by police as the Central North Correctional
Centre (CNCC) inmate who died last Wednesday in hospital following an
altercation with another prisoner. A post-mortem examination determined
Tu, 28, died as a result of a stab wound. Tu is the fourth CNCC inmate
to die in the last year, and a coroner's inquests will be held into the
death.
May 7, 2004 Midland Free Press
A male inmate wounded in an altercation yesterday at the Central North
Correctional Centre died two hours later in a Midland hospital. He
is the fourth inmate to die in the last year. Police from the
Southern Georgian Bay OPP detachment cordoned off the living unit at the
privately-run prison where the incident occurred to conduct an
investigation.
May 6, 2004 Toronto
Star
An inmate has been stabbed to death at Ontario's only privately run
provincial prison, officials confirmed yesterday. "There was
a stabbing, the inmate was taken to hospital and he died and there is
currently an investigation into the incident," said Adrian Dafoe, a
spokesperson for Community Safety Minister Monte Kwinter. Central
North Correctional Centre in Penetanguishene has been dogged by
controversy, including health and safety issues, since the
maximum-security jail opened in November, 2001. It is the first murder
at the jail.
March
22, 2004 The Mirror
A 29-year-old jail guard may be spending some time on the other side of
the bars after he was charged by police for bringing a controlled
substance into the workplace. The man, a correctional officer at the
Central North Correctional Centre, was arrested while driving to work on
March 13, after a month-long investigation by OPP. He has worked at the
super jail for approximately one year, and was charged with trafficking
a controlled substance, breach of trust by a public
officer, and threatening.
Colorado Department of Corrections
February 28, 2006 Pueblo Chieftain
A private prison company is looking at Fremont County as the possible
home for two private prisons that could grow to a 4,250-inmate
population. So with nearly 8,000 inmates already living here, can the
county take on more than half that number in new inmates? Management
Training Corp., based in Centerville, Utah, is hoping so. The
corporation runs private prisons throughout the U.S. including Texas,
New Mexico and Arizona, and now is checking out Fremont County for two
potential private prisons. Consultant Nolin Renfrow, who retired from
the Colorado Department of Corrections after a 28-year career, is taking
on the developer role in an attempt to bring all the players together to
make it happen."I was intrigued by MTC - a private business, a
refreshing group with solid credentials. They are heavy into programs
and working with the inmates and I am just pro-corrections. . . . I
believe there are certain people who need to be locked up. "I hate the
thought of turning some inmates loose if there are not enough beds. So,
here I am, hoping to oversee the programming, designing and
construction, then I'll turn the keys over to MTC," Renfrow said. MTC
has decided to submit a proposal for both the two new private prisons
and hired Renfrow to come up with a plan.
Eagle Mountain
Community Correctional Facility, Eagle Mountain, California
March 21, 2007 The
Press-Enterprise
Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia, R-Cathedral City,
reiterated her opposition Wednesday to reopening a private prison at
Eagle Mountain, a remote community in Riverside County. The 500-bed
facility closed in 2003 shortly after a riot that killed two inmates and
injured dozens. This week, Senate Republicans proposed reopening the
prison as part of their plan this week to reduce prison crowding.
Garcia, whose district includes Eagle Mountain, said she will only
support using the prison as a minimum-security facility staffed by state
correctional officers. "I want to be clear and direct -- I am adamantly
opposed and will fight any effort to reopen a private prison at Eagle
Mountain under any conditions," Garcia wrote in a letter sent Wednesday
to Corrections and Rehabilitation Secretary James Tilton.
September 14, 2006 The Press-Enterprise
A Houston-based corrections company hopes to reopen a 500-bed lockup in
Eagle Mountain, three years after lawmakers closed the privately
operated prison. Riverside County officials confirmed Thursday that
they've received a proposal from Cornell Cos. for a 150,000-square-foot
correctional facility in the remote community near Joshua Tree National
Park. Cornell Cos. officials did not return telephone calls seeking
comment this week. The company's Web site says it operates 79
correctional facilities in 17 states, including California. Terry
Thornton, spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and
Rehabilitation, said the state has asked contractors to submit their
plans for operating 8,500 prison beds for men and women. Information
about the bidders and their proposals is confidential until the state
awards the contracts Nov. 17, Thornton said. Plans submitted to
Riverside County call for $27 million in new construction at the Eagle
Mountain site and say the project would create 150 jobs. County
Supervisor Roy Wilson, whose district includes Eagle Mountain, said
officials have promised to fast-track Cornell's proposal to help it meet
strict state deadlines, if the company receives the contract. But Wilson
said he expects the project to be vetted before the county Planning
Commission before coming to the Board of Supervisors for consideration.
"They need some kind of economic development out there," Wilson said.
"It's a ghost town. It's in dire straits." Five people live in Eagle
Mountain. Mary Zeiler, resident of Eagle Mountain for 36 years, said she
was sorry to see the minimum-security prison closed in 2003 when state
lawmakers cut funding for the prison run by Utah-based Management &
Training Corp. Two months before its closure, the prison, a converted
supermarket, fell under scrutiny when two inmates were killed and seven
inmates were injured in a riot. Kay Hazen, spokeswoman for Kaiser
Ventures, said she had not seen Cornell's proposal but that Kaiser
welcomes any opportunity to use the prison as a solution to the state's
shortage of prison beds. Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia, R-Cathedral City,
said she would like to see the state house inmates there but not under a
private contractor. "I am not supportive of any private prisons," Garcia
said.
July 12, 2005
Riverside
County Supervisor Jeff Stone on Tuesday challenged the sheriff to come
up with a better plan than his own for relieving the county's
overcrowded jails. Stone's challenge came during his barbed exchange
with Riverside County Undersheriff Neil Lingle, in which Stone defended
his idea of converting a defunct Eagle Mountain prison into a county
jail for $10.8 million. Eagle Mountain resident Larry Charpied said he
worked at the prison prior to its closure and experienced several riots
there, some of which resulted in multiple inmates' deaths. The Eagle
Mountain prison closed in 2003 when its private operator lost state
funding. "It
was not safe and that's why the state closed it," Charpied said.
November 29, 2004 Desert Sun
What was the result
of the preliminary hearing for the eight men accused of killing two
fellow inmates during a race riot at the Eagle Mountain Correctional
Facility in October 2003? All
eight men were held to answer charges in the deaths of Master Hampton,
36, and Rodman Wallace, 39, both of Los Angeles County, Nov. 1 after a
preliminary hearing which stretched over a three-week period, according
to Riverside County court records. If the defendants are
convicted, they face the death penalty or life in prison without the
possibility of parole. The eight were charged after the 2003 prison riot
during which several inmates were injured. One of the injured inmates
was Asian and the others, along with Hampton and Wallace, were
African-American. Their alleged attackers were Hispanic and Caucasian
inmates, according to Riverside County Sheriff’s Department reports. The
prison, which was operated by the Utah Based Management and Training
Corporation, has since been closed due to budget cuts.
October 15,
2004 Desert Sun
A preliminary hearing got under way this week in what could be the
biggest single murder case in California history in terms of the number
of defendants. Eight men are charged with murder in the deaths of two
fellow inmates at the former Eagle Mountain Correctional Facility during
a race riot a year ago. The
eight were charged after the October 2003 prison riot during which
several inmates were injured. The prison was closed two months
later due to budget cuts, said Margot Bach, a Department of Corrections
spokeswoman. Eagle Mountain was operated by the Utah-based Management
and Training Corporation. Several of the defense attorneys contend the
deaths could have been avoided. "Nobody from MTC was authorized to
use force or weapons," said Arnold Lieman, Mayfield’s attorney. A
Department of Corrections officer had a key to the prison’s weapons
arsenal but worked days and was gone when the riot broke out, Lieman
said.
March 5, 2004
Fourteen men charged in an allegedly racially motivated prison riot that
killed two men in the Eagle Mountain Correctional Facility in October
made their first court appearance in the case Wednesday. Judge B.
J. Bjork set a March 17 arraignment date for the men whose charges range
from murder to assault. All 14 were arrested on warrants
Tuesday. Three of the men -- David Olivares, Peter Morales and
Jason Hernandez --are charged with two counts of murder each by the
Riverside County District Attorney’s office, reported Riverside County
Sheriff’s Sgt. Frank Taylor of the Central Homicide Unit.
Anthony Rimoldi, Eric Lewis, Byron Mayfield, Jose Rodriguez and Hector
Careyo were each charged with one count of murder, he said. Those
eight also face special allegations that the crimes were race
related. Six others who participated in the melee at the now
closed Desert Center facility about 30 miles east of Indio were arrested
on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon along with an allegation
for committing the offense while housed in state prison. The men
were charged after a four-month investigation conducted by the Riverside
County Sheriff’s Department in which more than 500 interviews were
conducted, Taylor said. During the investigation into the riot,
which killed two and injured six African-American inmates and injured
one Asian inmate, officials learned the incident was race related.
(The Desert Sun)
March 4, 2004
Eight inmates at a privately run prison were charged with murder
Wednesday in an October riot that left two convicts dead, officials
said. The four-month probe of Eagle Mountain Community
Correctional Facility by Riverside County sheriff's investigators and
the district attorney's office also resulted in six additional inmates
being charged with assault with a deadly weapon. "The
evidence will show the defendants' behavior was animalistic, primitive
and racially motivated," said Riverside County Deputy District
Attorney Ulli McNulty, who is handling the case. "The crime scene
they left behind was death and devastation." The 90-minute
fight involving 150 inmates pitted a group of Hispanic and white inmates
against a group of black prisoners. They fought with barbecue skewers,
meat cleavers, table and chair legs, and two-by-fours. Others fought
with mop and broom handles. (AP)
January 5,
2004
The Eagle Mountain Community Correctional Facility, which used to house
more than 430 minimum-security prisoners, is one of three private
prisons forced to shut down as part of a decision by the Davis
administration and the state legislature. The private prison on
Wednesday ended its 15-year run as the Chuckwalla Valley's biggest
employer. The empty facility, which was run by Centerville,
Utah-based Management & Training Corp., is owned by Kaiser Ventures,
the former steel and iron ore mining company that also owns the town of
Eagle Mountain and land around it. "This is it," prison
security chief Clay Lambert said by phone. "It's kind of sad.
The people who lived and worked here are realizing now that it's like
breaking up a big family almost." Most of the employees and
their families lived in the town of Eagle Mountain, a community created
by Kaiser when it operated its mine here until the early 1980s. The town
had been boarded up for several years before the prison opened.
The families now living in housing subsidized by MTC and Kaiser have to
be out by Jan. 15, said Jan Roberts, who manages Kaiser's mine
reclamation project. "We can't operate the town on an individual
base without a cluster of people." (Press Enterprise)
January 5, 2004
A company-owned mining town that died once in the early ’80s will
become a ghost town again today when the sole employer -- a private
prison -- closes its doors for good. "It’s sad to see Eagle
Mountain go into a ghost town twice," said Michael Keegan,
facilities foreman for Kaiser Ventures Inc. The industrial giant
built Eagle Mountain in 1944 to house miners and their families.
When the iron mines closed nearly 40 years later, the town’s church,
store and 337 company homes were left to a slow decay. "A lot
of people come back to reminisce, they bring their grandchildren, and
they’re sad to see how things have become," Keegan said.
When the private Eagle Mountain Correctional Facility opened in 1988,
portions of the town gasped back to life. Kaiser Ventures made
some of Eagle Mountain’s homes inhabitable for prison workers and
their families. Under a contract with the prison’s operator,
Management & Training Corporation, families paid as little as $145 a
month for a three-bedroom home. Utah-based MTC provides about 16,000
prison beds nationwide. While some prison employees found the
isolated location to be a sort of hell, others fell in love with the
desolate desert and its silence. The closest supermarket is about 60
miles away. "I love it here. It’s a nice place for your
kids. There is peace and quiet and at night you can see every
star," said correctional officer Lisa Reynolds. She will hang up
her uniform today after nearly 13 years at the prison. Reynolds is
moving with some of her friends and family to Redding, but says she will
miss Eagle Mountain. "I guess this pretty much puts a lid on
it," she said, stepping through the empty prison barracks. Prison
employees have 15 days to evacuate their homes. Keegan, who works for
Kaiser overseeing infrastructure for the community, estimated it will
take 90 days to fully shut down the Eagle Mountain community. Then he,
too, will be out of a job. A kindergarten through eighth-grade
school will remain open at least until June for the 20 or so children
whose families live in the outskirts of Eagle Mountain. Without
this major employer in the area, the school, the only school in the
Desert Center Unified School District, will likely have to lock its
doors. If the school closes, students remaining in the district
will likely have to be bused to the Palo Verde Valley, which means a
three-hour round trip for the K-8 students. Whether or not the
hard scrabble mining-turned-prison town will get a third crack at life
remains to be seen. Los Angeles County might eventually fill in
the 1,500-foot-deep mining craters with its trash if it can work through
the technical and environmental challenges. But as of Tuesday
there were no takers for the bleak rows of boarded-up houses, a
secondhand prison and broken-down roads with red winter weeds pushing
stubbornly through the cracks. Riverside County Supervisor Roy
Wilson said he is hopeful the old prison might be used for a drug
rehabilitation center or something similar. "It’s a crying
shame. That private prison could handle prisoners more cost-effectively
than the state," Wilson said of the prison’s closure. At the
prison -- a converted strip mall with free-standing buildings
circumscribed with razor wire -- prison employees and a handful of
inmates worked to clear out boxes of records, furniture and prison
supplies. Bitterness over the closure was tangible Tuesday.
"We had been holding out hope, even up to today, but it does not
look good," said Clay Lambert, chief of security at Eagle Mountain
for 15 years. All of the minimum-security prison’s 432 inmates
were either shipped to state-run prisons or paroled to community-based
programs. Some of the 98 employees will go to work for other
out-of-state prisons operated by MTC. Many in Eagle Mountain blame
pressure from the powerful California Correctional Peace Officer’s
Association union for the closure of the facility, the only private-run
prison in the state where inmates have died. Two men were killed when
racial tensions broke out into a riot in October, in a situation Lambert
called "extremely unfortunate." Two other privately
operated prisons in California also will be closed today in Baker and
Mesa Verde. Those three prisons and two others -- Live Oak’s Leo
Chesney women’s prison and Wackenhut’s McFarland Community
Correctional Facility -- were targeted by the state Department of
Corrections and former Gov. Gray Davis for closure back in 2001. The
Davis administration proposed closing the five privately operated
prisons as a budget-cutting move to save $5 million from the state’s
multi-billion dollar budget deficit. The move to close the prisons
fell apart shortly before they were then scheduled to close on June 30,
2002. Jan Roberts, director of Eagle Mountain Operations for
Kaiser Ventures, said she was surprised at the prison’s closure,
despite its long struggle to stay open. "I have a deep,
profound disappointment," said Roberts. She has been in Sacramento
several times over the past three months lobbying for Eagle Mountain’s
survival. "I am working every day to find a use for our
facility and town site," she said. Roberts said she is
outraged the state would close down a prison that costs $38 a day less
per prisoner than state-run facilities. Each prisoner in state
facilities costs taxpayers an average of $28,000 a year. Prisoners
at Eagle Mountain were employed by Kaiser as day laborers at minimum
wage to perform work in the community. Some of that money was returned
to victims’ assistance programs and 20 percent to the state to cover
their room and board. "We are getting a double whammy,"
Roberts said. While Tip Kindel could not deny the union has been
pressuring the state to close private operations like Eagle Mountain,
the acting assistant secretary for external affairs of the California
Youth and Adult Correctional Agency said union pressure was not the
deciding factor in its closure. Most of the prisoners in Eagle
Mountain were minimum-risk parole violators serving short-term
sentences, Kindel said. Many, he said, would be better served in
community programs that cost the state about $2,100 a year, near their
family support systems and jobs. "The Department of
Corrections is trying to assist parolees to success. We want to find
community-based ways of taking care of them in a way that does not
jeopardize the community," Kindel said. Facilities like Eagle
Mountain could be operated for less, Kindel said, because they did not
take in ill, or high-risk inmates with greater needs and demands.
As residents prepared Tuesday to turn out the lights on Eagle Mountain,
however, there was a weariness with the bureaucracy they believed was
forcing them from their homes and jobs. "What town?"
asked correctional officer Ruben Hirst, when talking about the future of
Eagle Mountain. "This prison was the only thing that kept this area
alive." (The Desert Sun)
November
30, 2003
The gas station is shuttered and the old savings
and loan long gone. The movie house is dark, too. Some folks – driving
through the quiet community – no longer bother braking at stop signs.
There's not much life left in Eagle Mountain, a
former mining camp deep in the Riverside County desert. In
a few weeks, the tumbleweeds may claim it for good. At
the end of December, state corrections authorities plan to shut off
funding for the community's last remaining industry – a privately
managed prison. And that, locals
say, will mean the end of this once-vibrant company town. "It
just makes me want to sit down and cry," says longtime resident
Connie Ottinger. The facility is
among three private prisons in California due to close Dec. 31 as part
of what former Gov. Gray Davis and legislators portrayed as a
cost-cutting move. Officials with
the California Department of Corrections say fewer low-security prisons
– including a wave of private facilities that opened in the late 1980s
– are needed because of a steady decline in non-violent offenders
statewide. The Eagle Mountain
facility, which houses 240 men, is run by Utah-based Management &
Training Corp. under contract with California officials. Many
around town believe the closure demonstrates the political muscle of the
state prison guards union – the California Correctional Peace Officers
Association. The association has long opposed privately run, nonunion
prisons. Jeannette "Jan"
Roberts of Kaiser Ventures, which owns the community, notes that
privately managed prisons cost less to operate per inmate than public
facilities. "It does not make
economic sense to close this prison and close this town," says
Roberts, operations director with Kaiser and a longtime Eagle Mountain
resident. "We shouldn't let the union rule this state."
Hoping for an 11th-hour reprieve, Roberts and
others are trying to persuade Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state
lawmakers to keep the prison afloat. The rookie politician filmed one of
his action flicks – "Terminator 2: 3D" – in Eagle Mountain
about a decade ago. "GOVERNOR
SCHWARZENEGGER: PLEASE SAVE OUR SCHOOL AND TOWN," reads a sign on
the edge of the community. But with
the closure weeks away, folks here figure they may have little more than
a fool's hope. "All of our
best efforts may not be enough," Roberts says. The
town has faced extinction before. In
1983, Kaiser Ventures shut down an iron mine that had been in operation
since World War II. Hundreds of miners left town, forcing the closure of
a movie house, gas station and other businesses. The
prison opened five years later during a statewide crackdown on crime.
Today, about 350 people reside in the remote
community, renting houses provided by Kaiser. Most work at the prison.
Eagle Mountain is roughly 125 miles northeast of
San Diego. Savings to state Terry Thornton, a state
Department of Corrections spokeswoman, says the closure of Eagle
Mountain, along with two private jails in central California, will save
the state nearly $900,000 over the next four years. She dismissed
concerns that the closure is part of a power play by the guards'
association, while a union official called the idea "utterly
ridiculous." Lance Corcoran, a spokesman with the guards'
association, says allowing a private corporation to house state inmates
only benefits the business, not the public. "The commitment
of private business is to the bottom line, to a corporate board of
directors," Corcoran says. "Public safety should not go to the
lowest bidders." According to state corrections officials,
the cost of housing an inmate in a privately managed prison is $17,000 a
year, compared to $28,000 in a state facility. But Corcoran and
others say the cost gap isn't as wide as it appears. Unlike state
prisons, private facilities are not required to fund the cost of
transferring prisoners and other key expenses. Dozens of Eagle
Mountain inmates were transferred out in October following a jailhouse
riot that left two convicts dead. The violent incident is under
investigation. The riot is believed to be the first of its kind at
a privately managed prison in California. Folks around Eagle
Mountain call the riot unfortunate, but hope state officials don't see
it as another excuse to close the prison down. Tears fall
Ottinger, 45, has lived in the area 35 years and is secretary at Eagle
Mountain School, a K-through-8 campus. She remembers when the iron mine
shut down and tears up at the prospect of the prison closure.
"I can't stand the idea of that happening again," she
says. She believes Eagle Mountain was an ideal place to grow up.
Neighbors looked out for neighbors. Kids biked around town and few
worried for their safety. Weekends were for barbecues.
"People ask me why I would stay in a place like this. And I say you
don't know what it was like growing up here." The school,
which has about 50 students, has enough state funds to stay open for the
rest of the academic year. Kaiser has proposed converting part of
the old mine into a landfill, giving the community another lease on
life. But the proposal has been slowed by environmental
challenges. Carl Stuart, a spokesman with Management &
Training Corp., said his business has proposed the creation of a drug
rehabilitation center at Eagle Mountain. In the meantime, his
company is in discussions with the governor's office to save the prison.
"We haven't given up hope," he says. Roberts tries to
stay upbeat too, but knows the days may be numbered. Some prison
employees are moving out. Others have stopped watering their
yards. "I've been the eternal optimist," she says.
"But it's very difficult to remain optimistic." (The
San-Diego Union-Tribune)
October 29,
2003 LA Times
More than 130 inmates have been transferred out of a privately run state
prison in eastern Riverside County after a weekend riot there left two
convicts dead and tensions at the low-security lockup unusually high.
State corrections officials said a melee Saturday night at the prison in
Eagle Mountain involved about 150 inmates and raged for 90 minutes
before a warning shot fired into the ground by an off-duty correctional
officer quelled the fighting. The deaths were the first violence-related
fatalities at any of the nine California prisons run by private
corporations under contract with the state, a corrections official
said.
October 28,
2003
Two men were killed and seven others were injured during a riot at Eagle
Mountain Community Correctional Facility. The Riverside County
Sheriff’s Department said Sunday that the riot occurred shortly before
7 p.m. Saturday night. Deputies reported that one man died at the
prison and the other man died at John F. Kennedy Memorial Hospital in
Indio. The other injured inmates were taken to JFK, Desert
Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs and Eisenhower Medical Center in
Rancho Mirage, according to the sheriff’s department. Deputies
said the riot started with an altercation between a group of white and
Hispanic inmates who reportedly attacked a group of black inmates at the
facility. The names of the two dead men have not been release
pending notification of their families. Autopsies have been scheduled
for this week on the bodies of the two inmates who were killed.
Sheriff’s Department Central Homicide Unit is investigating the case
with help from deputies in the Blythe, Indio and Palm Desert sheriff’s
stations. Eagle Mountain Community Correctional Facility is a
private prison that houses male prisoners for the state of
California. (The Desert Sun)
August 27,
2002
Poor Bill Simon. even when he wins, he loses. It should be a
major coup when the Republican candidate for governor snags the
endorsement of one of the oldest and most respected names in Latino
politics: the Mexican-American Political Association, known as MAPA.
After years of voting increasingly Democratic, are California Latinos
opening their minds to Republicans? There is one interesting
wrinkle in all of this. Angel Diaz, a Delano businessman who
helped round up support for Simon among the chapter presidents who
backed him last weekend, runs a Central Valley political committee that
raises money from individuals and companies and distributes it mostly to
Latino candidates. The group, known as Adelante, appears to bean
extension of the Maranatha Private Corrections Co. and its top
executive, Terry Moreland, who have given the committee a combined
$70,000 since 1999. With Davis having promised the state's prison
guards union that he would eliminate private prisons, Maranatha and its
allies have good reason to fear a second Davis term- and thus to support
Simon. So it could be that behind the veneer of Latino politics,
this was just a good old-fashioned business deal. As usual, when
all else fails to bring clarity in politics, follow the money.
(Sacramento Bee)
June 3, 2002
Eagle
Mountain, named for the rose-colored
peaks on its
northern edge, fears it is on the brink of
disappearing.
Founded
in 1947 as an outpost to mine iron ore, the
town managed
to outlast the mine by converting old miners'
dormitories into a state
prison in 1988. But now the Eagle Mountain Community
Correctional
Facility is one of five prisons scheduled to close at
the end of June,
signaling not only the possible end of this windswept
desert
community of 300 residents, but also the waning of a
national boom
in prison building.
After
decades of growth, state prisons have become a
prime target
of cutbacks. The reasons: the national drop in crime,
state budget
shortfalls, the easing of some strict prison
policies, and changing
public opinion about how to handle criminals,
particularly those
convicted
of drug-related offenses. Nationally,
$1
of every $14 in
states' general funds is spent on corrections,
according to Vincent
Schiraldi, president of the Justice Policy Institute,
a
Washington-based organization that advocates reducing
incarceration rates. So-called three-strikes laws, requiring
violent offenders convicted of a third felony to be held for 25 years to
life without parole, also being reconsidered. Throughout the
nation, states are finding ways to reduce the inmate population.
(The Bradenton)
April
25, 2002
Eastern Riverside County residents pleaded with lawmakers Wednesday not
to shut down Eagle Mountain's sole industry, a private prison.
"This community will close," warned Jeanette "Jan"
Roberts of Desert Center. A Senate budget panel voted 2-0 to keep
open the Eagle Mountain prison, another in Baker in San Bernardino
County and three in the Central Valley. But the powerful state
prison guards' union and Gov. Davis want the five private lockups shut
down after June 30, when their contracts with the state expire.
Craig Brown, a lobbyist for the California Correctional Peace Officers
Association, which represents guards who work at state prisons, said the
nine private prisons mask their true cost by shipping chronically ill
inmates back to the state Corrections Department for care. (The
Press-Enterprise
December 3,
2001
There is the "possibility" that the Department of Corrections
could reduce or pull on funding for the 438-bed Eagle Mountain Community
Correctional Facility. The stated reason is fiscal
belt-tightening. (The Press Enterprise)
East Texas
Intermediate Sanction Facility, Longview, Texas
September 30, 2005 Tyler Morning Telegraph
In other business Thursday, county commissioners allowed the sheriff
to move forward with plans to convert the Marvin A. Smith Regional
Juvenile Center to the Marvin A. Smith Criminal Justice Center. With the
county's jail population hovering around capacity, the county plans to
take the already-closed juvenile facility and turn it into a low-risk
adult detention facility in April. He also said after the meeting that
Management and Training Corp., which leases a total of 300 beds in the
county's jail, has been put on verbal notice that the county currently
is not in a position to renew its contract, which expires in February
2007. The sheriff said officials are working with the company on finding
a new place to house those inmates when that time comes.
Giles W. Dalby Correctional Facility, Post,
Texas
January 17, 2001 Lubbock
Avalanche-Journal
Sixteen federal prisoners confined to the Giles W. Dalby Correctional
Facility in Post filed a class-action lawsuit Tuesday alleging violation
of due process and their civil rights. The inmates, all immigrant aliens
in the United States, filed suit in U.S. District Court in Lubbock.
Management and Training Corporation runs the private prison, which
contracts with the federal government to house inmates. The lawsuit
claims that Dalby inmate receive inadequate medical care, food,
rehabilitation programs and legal supplies, among other complaints.
August 1, 2000 Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
A corrections officer suffered a concussion in a riot early Sunday
morning at a medium-security prison in Post after being struck by an
object thrown by an inmate, a county judge Giles Dalby said Monday. He
said the riot started on "Main Street," a wide outdoor sidewalk area
that splits the facility's two holding areas. According to Dalby, about
500 inmates gathered on the sidewalk at about 8:30 pm. Saturday and
began loitering and making demands to the correction officers. "The
officers were able to talk them down to about 250 inmates," Dalby said.
"When the officers told them to lock up at around 12:30 am, some obeyed
and some didn't. A crowd of about 10 inmates stayed in the area." The
inmates then began to break wooden picnic tables and set them on fire.
They also pulled gutters off the side of the building and damaged seven
surveillance cameras, Dalby said. "That is when we pulled our people
back to safety and called the safety response team," Dalby said.
According to Dalby, the number of inmates involved in the riot swelled
to about 200 as the mayhem continued. The facility's response team was
called in at about 1:45 am Sunday and dispersed the crowd in 9 minutes
using tear gas, Dalby said.
Hood County Juvenile Detention Center,
Hood County, Texas
February 1, 2006 Hood County News
The now abandoned county juvenile detention center drew attention from
two county judge candidates at the political forum Monday night for
candidates in the March 7 Republican primary. Precinct 2 county
commissioner Charles Baskett placed the blame on county judge Andy Rash
for the loss of $837,00 in operating expenses at the juvenile detention
center (JDC). Rash countered that the county inherited the JDC problem
and took action to try and protect their credit rating. In addition to
Baskett and incumbent judge Rash, former Granbury mayor Rick Frye is
also seeking election to the position of county judge. Baskett said the
juvenile detention center was built by an outside contractor, who then
leased the facility to the county. The county then sub-leased the
facility to MTC, the company that ran the facility as a JDC for about a
year. “At the end of a year, they had lost $1.2 million. They (MTC)
cancelled their lease with the county and left town,” Baskett said. “I
tried to find someone to come back in to run the facility as a JDC. No
one was interested. They couldn’t make the numbers work. “Then the
juvenile board came up with a budget, and it was put on the
commissioners’ court agenda to determine whether Hood County should run
the facility.” Baskett contends the center was supposed to be run by a
private enterprise, and that the county had no business getting involved
in managing the center. “It was a 3-2 vote to run the center on our own.
We had no obligation to do it,” Baskett said. “We ran it for a few
months and lost $837,000 before we had to discontinue. We held the
lease. We could have given it up. “They said they were worried about
losing our bond rating, and that’s why we should continue to operate the
facility. We lost it (bond rating) anyway. “We should have never tried
to run that facility ourselves. Now our bond rating is BBB.” “Had we
terminated our lease and not attempted to operate, both Standard and
Poor, and Moody threatened to lower our bond rating to BBB-,” he said.
Kyle Unit, Hays County, Texas
March 16, 2008 Austin American-Statesman
Two men who escaped from a Kyle private prison were apprehended this
afternoon, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The
two men were apprehended while walking on County Road 158 about three
miles east of the facility, according to Jason Clark, a public
information officer with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
Jeremy Trevino, 21, and Justin Doty, 23, escaped from the Kyle Unit in
Hays County over a wall in the recreation yard shortly before 10 p.m.
Saturday. Clark said the two men were imprisoned there for parole
violations. “Anytime an offender escapes, we always work quickly to get
them back into custody,” Clark said. “You just don’t know what they’re
capable of.”
Lake Erie Correctional Institution,
Conneaut, Ohio
May 18, 2005 AP
Ashtabula County's budget problems are so
severe that dozens of crimes committed at one of the state's two
privately operated prisons aren't being prosecuted. The northeast Ohio
county doesn't have enough money to handle all the crimes reported,
Prosecutor Thomas Sartini said. Some crimes reported at the Lake Erie
Correctional Institution are being overlooked as a result. "I don't
like not to prosecute any case that's a legitimate case," Sartini
said. "I've always taken the position that we're going to prosecute
cases to the fullest extent, but if I've got one hand tied behind my
back, it's a little tough to do. So we're in a position where we've had
to make some calls. The only crimes consistently prosecuted from the
prison involve inmates assaulting guards or attempts to smuggle drugs
into the prison. State Highway Patrol records show that inmate attacks
on other inmates are usually overlooked. Prisoners aren't being
prosecuted for having weapons, either.
March 14,
2004
An inmate at the Lake Erie Correctional Institution was found badly
beaten Tuesday afternoon, officials said. The inmate, identified as
Bobby Donaldson, 22, was reportedly struck by a padlock placed inside a
sock, officials said. (Star Beacon)
January 24, 2003
CONNEAUT -
The state prison perched on Conneaut's East Side generated nearly
$400,000
for the city's budget last year, nearly half of that in municipal
income-tax revenues, according to figures provided by Finance Director
John Williams. The
information has been relayed to Gov. Bob Taft, who on Wednesday
confirmed he will close at least one state prison to help heal a $720
million budget deficit. The Lake Erie Correctional Institution in
Conneaut has not been excluded, officials have said.
The medium-security prison is operated by Management and Training
Corp., of Utah, and MTC employees - more than 250 people - paid nearly
$125,000 in city income taxes, Williams said.
The prison also buys a huge amount of water from the city. Water
revenue from the prison was $88,000, while sewer revenue was $159,000,
Williams said. Conneaut
counts on prison-related revenues to help pay off its prison-related
debt. To entice the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction to
consider a Conneaut site for its first privately managed prison, the
city offered gifts of land and infrastructure.
While the state contributed more than $39 million to the prison
project - primarily in construction costs - Conneaut agreed to absorb
nearly $2.1 million in expenses. The city's expenses include sewer lines
($647,000), waterlines ($591,000), a mandatory water tank ($532,000) and
land ($309,000). Loans were obtained to help the city handle the costs.
The city bought nearly 500 acres of land from USX Corp. and
donated some 175 acres to the state for the prison. The balance of the
acreage is home to the East Conneaut Industrial Park and the city's
compost site. State Rep.
George Distel, D-Conneaut, has said the loss of the prison would
bankrupt the city since it would lose its main method of repaying the
prison debt. Distel has said he has shared Williams' information with
Taft's office. (The Staff)
Management and Training Corporation,
Ogden, Utah
January 31, 2007 KSL TV
A Utah-based company has been forced to pay back wages to hundreds of
current and former employees in Texas following an investigation.
Management and Training Corporation --- which is headquartered in
Centerville, Utah -- has paid nearly $486,000 in back wages to just over
260 current and former security guards. That's according to a U- S Labor
Department new release. An investigation by the labor department found
employees had NOT been properly paid over a two-year period between
October 2003 and September 2005. Federal officials say the company
failed to pay proper overtime --- meal breaks when employees worked
beyond their schedules and the correct fringe benefits. The company has
agreed to comply with future contracts.
December 17, 2005 Deseret News
The U.S. Department of Labor announced Friday that Management &
Training Corp., headquartered in Centerville, has paid $169,105 in back
wages to 393 employees at five locations in Utah, Indiana, Ohio and New
Mexico. The back wages were paid following an investigation by the
department's Wage and Hour Division for compliance with the Fair Labor
Standards Act, the Labor Department said in a statement. Supervised by
the department, MTC conducted a companywide self-audit and found that
some employees, including security personnel, were not paid for all
hours worked. MTC employs more than 2,000 workers at 24 Job Corps
Centers and six correctional facilities throughout the country.
Marana Community Correctional Treatment
Facility, Tucson, Arizona
February 11, 2010 AP
A private prison in Arizona is on lockdown after a brawl broke out that
involved as many as 150 minimum-security inmates and left a staff member
and 12 prisoners with minor injuries. The Arizona Department of
Corrections said the fight broke out before 10 p.m. Wednesday but was
contained within an hour. A 20-member tactical unit from Arizona State
Prison Complex-Tucson responded to help put down the disturbance. The
Marana Community Correctional Treatment Facility near Tucson houses 500
inmates and is owned and operated by Management and Training Corp.,
based in Centerville, Utah. The cause of the fight is under
investigation.
June 21, 2004 Explorer News
The chief of security for the Marana Community Correctional Treatment
Facility was fired June 1 and a sergeant resigned May 26 over
allegations the sergeant had prisoners do pushups in lieu of
written discipline. Company spokesman Carl Stuart would not
comment on why Capt. Ken Anderson was fired or why Sgt. Ben Rumbo
resigned, saying the company does not comment on personnel matters. The
Utah-based Management and Training Corporation operates the Marana
prison and a prison in Kingman for the Arizona Department of Corrections
and nine other private prisons in five states. Anderson, who was
the company's Correctional Officer of the Year in 1999, said he was
shocked and outraged over his firing. In a four-page written appeal he
filed with the company June 7, Anderson called the termination notice he
received, "nothing more than a fabrication of half-truths and outright
falsehoods, sprinkled with occasional facts." He said he believed
he handled the allegation of prisoners being made to do pushups properly
based on the information he had at the time. Since his forced
leave and termination, Anderson said he has learned of allegations about
other prison guards making prisoners do pushups, possibly since January,
yet no other guards have been fired or suspended, or apparently even
interviewed by state investigators. Stuart said the company
doesn't know how long or how often prisoners have been made to do
disciplinary pushups at the prison.
McKinley County Detention Center, Gallup,
New Mexico
January 5, 2007 Gallup Independent
It took the jury less than two hours with lunch included to find Brian
Orr not guilty of using his power at the McKinley County Adult Detention
Center to sexually abuse three female prisoners in 2003. The issue in
the trial centered around the fact that jurors had to decide who was
telling the truth the three female prisoners from Wyoming or Orr, who
worked at the facility at the time. The three women told the jury of
having girlfriend-boyfriend relations with Orr, getting gifts and being
abused. One woman told of being handcuffed nude in his office while he
took photos of her on his digital camera. The problem was that was all
the jury had to go by the words of the three women. There was no
corroborating evidence and Steve Seeger, Orr's defense attorney,
stressed in his closing arguments the background of the three women and
the reasons why they were in jail in the first place. Pointing out their
crimes, which ranged from forgery and passing bad checks to distribution
of methampthemines, he asked the jury "would you buy a vehicle" from
them? In the end, the jury apparently decided not to believe anyone and
issued a statement after the verdict about "the poor quality of the
investigation" and their belief that it wasn't done "in a professional
and competent manner."
January 3, 2007 Gallup Independent
Testimony began Tuesday in the Brian Orr case. Orr faces three
counts of criminal penetration stemming from accusations made by three
Wyoming women, who were incarcerated in the McKinley County Adult
Detention Center in 2003 and 2004. Two of the three accusers testified
Tuesday, claiming that they had a boyfriend-girlfriend type of
relationship with Orr while they were incarcerated. Orr at the time was
a captain at the jail. One of the women claimed that on one occasion as
she was being moved from one area of the jail to another Orr put a hand
down her pants and inserted his finger inside her. The other woman
claimed Orr did the same thing to her once when she was in his office.
Both women claimed that Orr made promises to each of them about a future
after they got out of jail, brought them gifts and gave them favorable
treatment. Orr, who was terminated from his position after the charges
were made, was also sued in civil court by the three women. Also named
in the suit were McKinley County and Management Training Center, the
private company that ran the jail at the time. A settlement was
eventually made in the civil suit and McKinley County officials said
that no county money was involved. MTC and its insurance company agreed
to pay the settlement, the terms of which were kept confidential,
although one of the accusers at the trial said she received $55,000 as
her share of the settlement. This civil suit is expected to play a major
role in the criminal case with Steve Seeger, Orr's defense attorney,
asking the accusers how the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed
the suit on behalf of the female inmates, got involved in the case in
the first place. Both women testified that the ACLU contacted them and
not the other way around. This led Mike Calligan, chief deputy
prosecutor for the McKinley County's District Attorney's Office, to ask
permission to call to the stand Wednesday one of the ACLU attorneys to
explain how the organization got involved in the case.
January 28, 2006 Gallup Independent
Las Vegas Metropolitan Police arrested fugitive and former McKinley
County Adult Detention Center supervisor Bryan Orr this week in
connection with the sexual assault of two female inmates. Chief Deputy
District Attorney Michael Calligan on Friday confirmed Orr's arrest in
the Las Vegas area. Orr was wanted in McKinley County on charges of
criminal sexual contact with an inmate. The charges stem from his tenure
as a lieutenant at the detention center. He resigned from his position
with the facility in 2005 and failed to appear for his arraignment on
the criminal charges in August. Sheila Black, 28, and Christine Herden,
23, had been jailed at the detention center in Gallup in 2003 because
there was no room for them at the Wyoming Women's Center in Lusk. The
women claim Orr sexually assaulted and took nude pictures of them during
their stay at the facility. Orr is also a target of a federal lawsuit
filed by The American Civil Liberties Union that cites "cruel and
unusual punishment" on his behalf. The McKinley County Board of
Commissioners and former managing agent, Management and Training
Corporation, were also named in the suit for failure to properly
supervise and train Orr.
January 24, 2006 Casper Star-Tribune
The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a federal lawsuit against a
New Mexico detention officer, alleging he sexually assaulted two female
inmates from Wyoming at a Gallup, N.M., jail and photographed them in
the nude. At the time of the alleged incidents in 2003, the inmates were
housed in New Mexico because of overcrowding at Wyoming's only female
correctional institution, the Wyoming Women's Center in Lusk. The
lawsuit claims sexual abuse and cruel and unusual punishment by
Detention Officer Brian Orr of the McKinley County (N.M.) Detention
Center. The complaint was filed on behalf of inmates Sheila Black and
Christine Herden. The ACLU alleges that Orr repeatedly sexually
assaulted the two women and photographed them in the nude, causing
physical injury and severe psychological and emotional distress. The
complaint also alleges that the jail's acting warden, Gilbert Lewis, the
McKinley County commissioners and the Centerville, Utah, company that
managed the jail, Management and Training Corp., were negligent for
failing to properly train and supervise Orr.
September 4, 2003 Santa Fe New Mexican
McKinley County is terminating its contract with the Utah-based company
that has been operating the county jail, a facility plagued by problems.
Four inmates escaped from the jail, run by Management & Training
Corp., on July 4, after being left unsupervised in a recreation yard.
All four were later captured or surrendered, but investigators said the
escapees had a three-hour head start because guards at the jail did not
miss them until a head count later that day. MTC also operates the Santa
Fe County jail and that facility too has had problems. Warden Cody
Graham, who formerly headed the Santa Fe County jail, was fired a week
after the escape. In Santa Fe, a nine-member state audit team found the
jail needed to improve inmate classification, grievance procedures,
discipline, records and inmate programs.
July 11, 2003
Albuquerque Journal
The McKinley County jail's warden and the lone corrections officer who
was left in charge of 80 inmates during a Fourth of July jailbreak have
been fired. Management & Training Corporation, which manages the
McKinley County Adult Detention Center on a contract, took the action
after a series of security failures on the Independence Day holiday
allowed four inmates, including three suspected in killings, to
escape.
July 7, 2003 AP
Law enforcement officials are investigating why an escape from a
privately run county jail went unreported until one of the four
fugitives, injured jumping from the jail roof, showed up at a hospital a
few hours later. Two of the inmates, including one charged with murder,
were still on the run this morning. "We in law enforcement are
totally disgusted, and it's disheartening," said McKinley County
Sheriff's Deputy Ron Williams. The four escaped by leaping three floors
from the jail's rooftop exercise enclosure during an exercise period
that began about 9 a.m. Friday, authorities said. Law enforcement
officials found out about the escape more than three hours later when
one of the inmates, Manuel Vasquez, 32, hitched a ride to a hospital,
where doctors became suspicious of his explanation for his fractured
heel and cut arm and called police, Williams said. (AP, July 7, 2003 )
May 19, 2002 Albuquerque Journal
The McKinley County jail was locked down Sunday after disgruntled
inmates set a mattress on fire, jail officers reported. Eleven inmates
locked themselves in a section of the jail where the fire started, but
the incident was quickly quelled, said Sandy Aragon, director of
communications at the Gallup-McKinley County 911 center. The inmates
came out and the fire was extinguished, Aragon said.
Mohave County
Prison, Mohave County,
Arizona
March 29, 2007 The Daily News
Mohave County supervisors will decide on whether to end a contract
with an Oklahoma firm that built the county's only prison. Mohave County
Manager Ron Walker is asking supervisors to terminate a September 1999
contract between Mohave Correctional Services LLC and the county to
build and operate the state prison, which opened in August 2004 and is
located about 15 miles southwest of Kingman. The contract states that
MCS would pay Mohave County $3,000 a month in administration costs and
provide housing for about 50 county inmates. The county has tried to
make arrangements to house overflow county inmates but MCS has not
complied. Walker also said MCS has not paid the county any of the
administration costs in the contract, calling it a breach of contract.
“We don't want to partner with anyone who hasn't lived up to the first
piece of this contract,” Walker said. “Who are we dealing with here
anyway?” Walker said if the supervisors approve, in 30 days if the money
is not paid. the county will look at a contractual lawsuit for monetary
default. The contract also provides for a 60-day notice to correct any
non-monetary defaults, for example, transferring the contract to the
prison's current operator without permission from the county. Utah-based
Management & Training Corp. currently operates the prison, which houses
about 1,500 inmates. The prison houses male inmates sentenced throughout
Arizona on charges of drug possession and driving under the influence.
Walker said the contract issue was brought up after MTC officials
recently spoke to the board about partnering with the county to build a
federal prison in the county. Jim Hunter, former vice president of MCS,
said from Oklahoma that the contract was never validated when MCS sold
the land to Mohave Prison LLC in April 2004. The Tucson firm holds the
title and leases the land and the prison to the state for 10 years at
which time the state will own the facility. Hunter also said MCS, which
built the prison, does not exist anymore. He does not recall if MCS
transferred the contract to another firm. The 1999 contract states that
the contract is binding to the respective parties meaning the county and
MCS' successors. Mike Murphy, vice president of corrections marketing
for MTC, said at the previous supervisor meeting that MTC does not have
a contract to provide housing for overflow county inmates or to pay the
county any administration costs. The first 500 inmates arrived at the
prison on Aug. 9, 2004, and were housed in two units. The second phase
opened in April 2005 with permanent support buildings units and housing
for an additional 1,000 inmates.
Nacogdoches, Texas
May 1, 2009 Daily Sentinel
The proposed private federal prison — the subject of months of debate in
Nacogdoches — will not be built here, the Federal Bureau of Prisons,
said. The federal government rejected a proposal by the private prison
operator Management and Training Corporation to build the facility
because it was not competitive enough, according to an April 28 letter
from Amanda J. Pennel, a contracting officer with the bureau of prisons.
"After evaluating this proposal in accordance with the terms of the
solicitation, it was determined that this proposal was not among the
most highly rated proposals," the letter said. "A proposal revision will
not be considered," the letter continued. Proposals were evaluated on
criteria outlined in the federal acquisition regulation document,
including as price and past performance. The letter did not include any
specific information about why MTC's proposal was rejected, but MTC
officials will be able to request a "preaward debriefing" with further
information. In a statement, MTC Vice President Odie Washington said,
"Although this project will not move forward in the community, MTC looks
forward to perhaps one day working with community officials in the
future." Officials with the city, county and the Nacogdoches Economic
Development Corporation endorsed MTC's plan last summer because of the
economic benefits they believed it would bring to the area. But the
proposed prison also drew local critics who said the prison would erode
the quality of life in Nacogdoches and said local government failed to
consider the possible negative consequences of the facility. If
approved, the prison would have been minimum security facility,
primarily for holding illegal immigrants. NEDCO president Bill King said
the jobs and salaries the prison would have created would have been
helpful to Nacogdoches. "If you're going to have a correctional
facility, kind of the gold standard would be a federal minimum security.
They don't get much better than that," King said. "But it is what it is.
We gave it our best show and we're looking forward to the next
challenge." Several elected officials reached by telephone Friday shared
their thoughts on the news. "We were hoping that it would bring 300 jobs
to Nacogdoches county, so we're all a little disappointed. We needed
those jobs, especially with the state of the economy right now," County
Judge Joe English said. Asked if he would support another prison effort
in the future, English said, "I think we're out of the prison business
in Nacogdoches County." Representatives from the city weighed in on the
issue as well. "The subject of the prison has definitely caused a lot of
turmoil in the community, and as much as I personally regret that it's
not coming, I'm glad that we finally have a closure to the project,"
Southwest Ward Commissioner Billy Huddleston Jr. said. Northeast Ward
Commissioner Randy Johnson said he was "very disappointed" that the
prison would not come because it would have helped the economy by
creating jobs. Northwest Ward Commissioner Don Partin shared a tempered
reaction. "It was nothing to get excited about because it was never a
done deal," Partin said. "I'm just happy that the system took care of
itself. I'm happy everything happened not because of anger or fear or
greediness, but happened through the natural process." For opponents of
the prison, the news came as a victory. "This is the best news that I've
heard in a year or more," Paul Risk, chairman of the Citizens Opposed to
the Prison Site group that staged demonstrations and informational
campaigns against the project. "This prison would have been a blight on
the image of Nacogdoches. This is Christmas in May."
January 19, 2009 Daily Sentinel
Around 40 people attended a Citizens Opposed to the Prison Site (COPS)
meeting Monday, and the group's founder, Dr. Paul Risk, said the
organization is moving forward with a petition that could change the
city charter. Risk introduced a petition that would put an amendment on
the ballot in May that would require the city of Nacogdoches to provide
for initiatives or referenda in its charter. Five percent of registered
Nacogdoches voters, or about 850 people, would need to sign the petition
requesting the amendment, Risk said. If approved, the citizens of
Nacogdoches could vote down or uphold decisions made by the city
commissioners. The COPS group formed last summer to protest a proposed
federal private prison that would be built inside Loop 224 on Northwest
Stallings Drive. The city commissioners, county commissioners and
Nacogdoches Economic Development Corporation unanimously backed the
proposal, which would be built and operated by Management and Training
Corporation. If Nacogdoches is chosen for the prison, MTC officials
expect the facility to create 300 jobs and bring in nearly $1 million
per month in salaries. Starting wages for correctional officers are
likely to be around $30,000 to $32,000 per year, according to MTC
representatives. County Judge Joe English said it is still too soon to
say if a prison will end up in Nacogdoches, and he said city and county
officials "don't even know if we're in the top 100" prospective sites.
Risk said the group has made efforts to see if the county or city
concealed information about the prison before it was put to a vote in
the respective commission meetings. The COPS group recently made an open
records request from the city and county for all correspondence,
including e-mails and phone logs, between the local officials and MTC.
The city provided about 2700 documents to the group, Risk said. Risk
contacted the attorney general's office after the county denied their
request, though English said the attorney general's office cleared the
county of any wrongdoing. The county complied with the law, but the COPS
group did not follow the correct procedures in their open records
request, according to English. "Their original request was addressed to
(County Clerk) Carol Wilson. When they send an open records request to
Carol Wilson, they're going to get all the records she has," English
said. "They requested her letters, not the judge's or the
commissioners'. If they want information from my department, their (open
records request) needs to be addressed to me." The group later corrected
their request and English said the county supplied them with all
available documents, though he said the group would receive little, if
any, new information. The COPS group presented the commissioners with a
number of articles and letters during a public forum in October, and
those same documents accounted for the majority of the information the
county delivered in response to the open records request, English said.
"They have to pay 10 cents per copy, and basically they just bought back
everything they gave us," English said. "I don't think they got what
they thought there were going to get." Risk also said NEDCO declined to
provide requested documents, though a lawyer from NEDCO said the
organization is a privately run entity that does not have to abide by
the Freedom of Information Act. The COPS group has also been circulating
an informal petition with signatures from people opposed to the prison.
Risk said the group now has around 2,800 signatures, or about 4.5
percent of the county.
North Coast Correctional Facility, Grafton,
Ohio
September 10, 2009 Chronicle-Telegram
EMH Regional Medical Center is locked in a dispute with the private
contractor that runs the North Coast Correctional Treatment Facility in
Grafton over unpaid medical bills for inmates treated at the hospital. A
lawsuit filed earlier this year accuses Utah-based Management and
Training Corp. of failing to pay $628,193.81 in medical bills it racked
up for inmates between September 2006 and February 2009. But Tim Reid,
the company’s attorney, said Management and Training doesn’t actually
owe the hospital the money. Instead, he said, a former subcontractor is
responsible for the outstanding bills. Management and Training has been
paying its bills since severing ties with Arizona-based First
Correctional Medical in May 2008, Reid said. That company, he said, ran
into financial problems and fell behind in paying the medical bills
under a contract with the hospital. But Management and Training didn’t
realize how much money was owed until after the lawsuit was filed in May
of this year, Reid said. “We realized there was a problem, but we didn’t
know the extent of the problem,” he said. First Correctional and the
Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction are not named as a
party in the lawsuit, according to court records. Julie Walburn, an ODRC
spokeswoman, said the prison system paid Management and Training about
$15.4 million in fiscal year 2009 to operate the North Coast prison,
which mostly houses prisoners convicted of drunken driving and other
substance abuse crimes. “They’re responsible for providing medical care
to inmates,” she said.
July 30, 2002 AP
Thirty-six inmates have been moved in the past week from their prisons
to other institutions because of disciplinary problems. Twelve inmates
were moved Tuesday from the privately run North Coast Correctional
Treatment Facility in Grafton to the Marion Correctional Institution for
refusing to wear proper uniforms, department spokeswoman Andrea Dean
said. On Saturday, 24 inmates at the Southeastern Correctional
Institution in Lancaster who would not return to their living areas were
moved to other prisons, Dean said. The Ohio Civil Service Employees
Association, which represents some prison workers, including guards,
said removal of 12 inmates from the privately run prison, which has
nonunion guards, demonstrates that the state puts its problem inmates in
union prisons. "We shouldn't be cleaning up problems that for-profit
companies created," said Darrell Starcher, the president of the union's
local at the Marion prison. Dean said that none of the disciplined
Lancaster inmates were moved to private prisons. "We're not targeting
inmates in a private facility," Dean said.
July 7, 2002 Chronicle-Telegram
The company that operates the North Coast Correctional Treatment
Facility and the state' only other privately run prison has agreed to
take a $400,000 cut in its contracts with state. The future of the
privately operated prison here appears more secure after the state
negotiated its contract to lower costs by $400,000. Management and
Training Corp. of Utah, the company that runs North Coast Correctional
Treatment Center in Grafton and another prison in Conneaut, agreed to
the cut in contracts. But if the economy tumbles and further cuts are
ordered, the local privately run prison, as well as the one in Conneaut,
could be targeted for closure, he said.
Prescott Valley, Arizona
October 18, 2007 The Daily Courier
The town council will not support plans by a Utah-based company to
consider the outskirts of town for a private prison. Overwhelming vocal
opposition to a 2,000-bed, minimum-security prison for nonviolent male
inmates apparently persuaded the council Thursday against proceeding
with endorsing the prison. Opponents expressed concerns to the council
about Prescott Valley having the label of "prison town," and facing
declining property values and other negative effects. The council met
Oct. 4 with representatives of Management and Training Corp., a
Centerville, Utah-based company that proposed a 100-acre site a mile
north of Highway 69 and parallel to Old Fain Road. The council did not
take any formal action during the work/study meeting Thursday, but Town
Manager Larry Tarkowski indicated he would not put a letter of support
on the agenda for next Thursday. The sole support for the prison on the
council came from Mary Baker, who cited the benefit of 500 jobs.
Opponents in excess of 10 people dominated a packed council chamber.
Council members also indicated that prison opponents bombarded them with
e-mails and phone calls. "We had so many people who said 'no,' and I
have to go with that," Mayor Harvey Skoog said after five people spoke
out against the prison. Two people spoke in favor of the prison. "I am
not worried about the prisoners that are escaping, but I am worried
about the factor of the money you would lose on your house," opponent
Frank Shank, a retired diesel mechanic and Teamster union representative
from Detroit, said after the meeting. He said that he lost $50,000 on a
house in Jackson, Mich., a number of years ago because of the presence
of a prison. Prison supporter Linda Shimmin, a retired restaurant owner,
faulted the review process for killing the prison plans. "I think the
(council) decision is fine," she said after the meeting. "It's the
process that concerned me. Management and Training was not here tonight.
I think the visceral reactions might have been mitigated had Management
and Training been allowed to make a presentation." Shimmin drew some
applause - and a number of boos - when she pleaded her case for the
prison during the council meeting. Audience members also applauded
opponents who spoke at the podium and when the council members indicated
that they would go with the will of the public. The council had
scheduled the meeting in the first place to review the costs for water
and other infrastructure for the prison.
Promontory Community Correctional Center, Draper,
Utah
February 20, 2006 The Spectrum
Utah has one of the country's lowest incarceration rates, according to
federal data, but is climbing from a booming population growth spurt
that has increased the incarcerated population by 200 to 300 inmates
each year. The Utah prison system is overwhelmed with more than 6,350
inmates statewide - including a large percentage housed at Purgatory
Correctional Facility in Washington County - making more bed space
desperately needed. Two facilities are being built, one in Gunnison and
the other facility in Beaver County, where the state intends to rent 200
beds to house its inmates. Also, corrections is requesting another
192-bed facility to be built in Gunnison. Senate Bill 175, sponsored by
Sen. Howard A. Stephenson, R-Draper, calls for the Department of
Corrections to issue and evaluate a request for proposals from private
prison contractors, county jails and other interested agencies for a
300-bed or larger minimum-security correctional facility to accommodate
prison-sentenced criminals beyond that. We commend Stephenson and the
corrections department for their foresight in dealing with the rising
housing needs of criminals. However, taxpayers should urge lawmakers to
do some analysis as they embark on mingling public and private
enterprise, based on the state's history in that corrections
partnership. Utah's first privately run prison, Promontory Correctional
Facility - a 400-bed, low-security facility located on the northwest
side of the Draper prison site, which was closed because of budget cuts
- was administered by Ogden's Management and Training Corporation. Three
weeks after it opened in August, 1995, two inmates escaped in broad
daylight by crawling through a fence. Every year until it closed on July
1, 2002, there were one to two escapes. A pre-release program through
that facility resulted in 102 parolees enrolled in it simply walking
away within a 10-month period. One in particular was by 35-year-old Stan
Lee Foster, a man convicted for a string of thefts and burglaries in
Southern Utah. He was enrolled in the "cutting edge" halfway-back
program in May 1999, but two months later hopped onto a bus in Sandy to
go to work never to return. Six days after he walked away, he was
fatally shot by an FBI agent investigating a rash of bank robberies.
Aside from budget cuts that were cited for the closure of the prison,
heavily-rumored high staff turnover rates and drug use by inmates were
disclosed by media outlets. The mixture of the public and private sector
of corrections through Promontory lasted a mere seven years. As SB-175
mandates the acceptance of bids for a new facility, and is considering
recommendations from corrections to highly consider privatization for
housing and treatment, we ask lawmakers to scrutinize the whole package
privatization has to offer with a fine-tooth comb. While it is admirable
to be looking toward the future to accommodate the increasing
incarcerated population, it is just as important to learn from mistakes
where failures occurred so as not to repeat them.
April 6, 1999 Salt Lake Tribune
Three prisoners who escaped from Utah's minimum-security prison at
Draper on Sunday were arrested 12 hours later by police who were tipped
they could find the fugitives at a Salt Lake City boarding house. One of
the three -- Jason William Kirk, 21, of Arizona -- was already on parole
but staying at Promontory, a pre-release center akin to a halfway house,
until he secured outside employment. Promontory is owned by the state
but managed by Management & Training Corporations (MTC). After
working in the commissary at Promontory and helping prepare Easter
breakfast around 8 a.m., the trio slipped to a grassy recreation area
outside the facility. They were discovered missing after a routine 11:30
a.m. head count.
June 16, 1998
Salt Lake Tribune
About 140 inmates at the Promontory pre-release facility at the Utah
State Prison refused to go into their dorms Monday afternoon, prompting
officials to use a gas grenade to disperse them. Prison spokesperson
Jack Ford said the inmates were in a common room and outside at the
400-bed privately operated Promontory facility when they refused to
return to their rooms for a 4p.m. head count. Fred VanDerVeur, the
Department of Corrections director of institutional operations, said
correctional officers used "some sort of gas grenade' to scatter
the inmates, all of whom are minimum-security and within weeks of
release.
July 12, 1996
Salt Lake Tribune
Freddy Lee Wolfe was to be paroled from Utah State Prison on Aug. 27,
but Thursday he decided his date with freedom was not soon enough.
Prison officials say Wolfe, who is serving 5-year terms for forgery and
theft by receiving, escaped at 12:30 p.m. while working at the Draper
prison's meat-processing plant. He was discovered missing an hour later
following a routine prisoner count.
September 5, 1995 Salt Lake Tribune
It may not be an alarming threat to public safety, but neither is it a
good sign. Utah's first privately run prison has been open less than
three weeks, and two inmates already have escaped--in broad daylight, by
crawling through a prison fence. The two escapees, Anthony Scott Bailey
and Eric Neil Fischbeck, are not particularly dangerous characters.
Fischbeck was serving time for burglary and drug possession, Bailey for
burglary. They were assigned to the Promontory Correctional Facility,
run by Management & Training Corp. of Ogden, because they were
preparing for parole.
Santa Fe County Adult Detention Center,
Santa Fe, New Mexico
November 19, 2007 New Mexican
Dickie Ortega lost his life at the hands of one man named Jesus and
another named Good. And while a Santa Fe County jury's conviction of one
of those men on second-degree murder and five other charges Monday
provided some peace of mind, Ortega's mother said the tragic chain of
events at the county jail that led to her son's death will remain a
source of pain. "When they asked Dickie why he was there, he told them
the truth, and it cost him his life," said Cordelia Martinez after the
jury found Jesus Aviles-Dominguez guilty. "If it wasn't for doctors and
medication, I don't know if I could go through this. I don't know if
I'll ever get over it. It's like a nightmare." Martinez, her husband,
Antonio Martinez, and her daughter and Ortega's sister, Delilah Brown,
sat through every day of testimony in Aviles-Dominguez's trial, which
lasted nearly three weeks. They also sat through the September trial of
Daniel Good, who pleaded no contest to two counts of aggravated battery
involving death and two counts of intimidation of a witness in the
middle of those proceedings. Cordelia Martinez said she was satisfied
with the jury's verdict and thanked members for "doing their duty."
"Well, at least I can put my son to rest now," she said. "He was a good
and wonderful son." In addition to second-degree murder, the jury of
eight men and four women convicted Aviles-Dominguez, 32, of two counts
of intimidation of a witness and three counts of conspiracy. He was
acquitted of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, three counts of
conspiracy and three counts of intimidation of a witness.
Aviles-Dominguez, who had to serve only 20 more days in jail at the time
of the assault on Ortega, now faces up to 52 1/2 years in prison.
"Bitches," Aviles-Dominguez said to no one in particular as sheriff's
deputies escorted him from the courtroom after his conviction. Other
inmates who were in the pod at the county jail when Ortega, 32, was
beaten to death testified that Aviles-Dominguez and Good were the
co-leaders of the dormlike accommodations. Ortega, a Chimayó resident,
allegedly made the fatal mistake of accusing a man he was arrested with
on narcotics and receiving-stolen-property charges of being a snitch or
a "rat," according to the inmates' testimony. Aviles-Dominguez and Good
allegedly attacked and beat up the man Ortega accused, the witnesses
said. However, another inmate stood up for the man who was attacked and
said he wasn't a rat. That led to a series of at least three retaliatory
beatings of Ortega — mainly at the hands of Aviles-Dominguez and Good —
which became progressively more brutal, the inmates testified. Finally —
according to two eyewitnesses — Aviles-Dominguez began stomping
repeatedly on Ortega's head, which left him unconscious.
Aviles-Dominguez and Good refused to allow one of the inmates to get
medical attention for Ortega, an inmate testified. Aviles-Dominguez
testified he didn't beat Ortega or the other man, and at one point tried
to give them advice on how things worked behind bars. He also told
jurors another inmate, Joe Coriz, stomped on Ortega's head, and
Aviles-Dominguez broke up that beating. While the verdict was not what
his client wanted, Gary Mitchell, Aviles-Dominguez's lawyer, said he
thought the system did its job. "At the end of the day, I walk out
thinking it was a fair jury, a fair prosecution and a fair judge," he
said. "One can't complain about that. But with all the guys in there
(when the beating occurred), we'll never know what in the Sam Hell
happened." One of the big problems spotlighted by the Ortega case is
understaffing at jails and prisons, Mitchell said. "You wonder where the
hell were the detention officers in all of this," he added. At the time
of the beating, one guard had been assigned to watch over three pods
containing about 60 inmates, Sheriff Greg Solano said at the time. A
second guard was assigned to man a control unit that overlooks six pods
of more than 100 inmates, he said. A private company, Management
Training Corp., ran the jail at the time, and a federal study had
previously highlighted short-staffing as a problem. Ortega's family
received a $600,000 settlement paid by MTC earlier this year after
filing a wrongful death lawsuit. Prosecutors initially said they would
seek the death penalty against both Good and Aviles-Dominguez. And
though they later backed off those plans, state District Court Judge Tim
Garcia ruled that if the penalty would have been in play, one jury would
have had to decide the men's guilt or innocence while another would have
decided the penalty. Good's attorney, Jeff Buckels, called the ruling "a
huge fringe benefit."
August 30, 2007 The New Mexican
The mother of a Chimayo man who hanged himself in the Santa Fe County
jail two years ago is suing the County Commission, the sheriff and the
firm that used to run the jail. Michael G. Martinez, 39, was jailed Aug.
21, 2005, on charges of aggravated assault, aggravated battery, assault
on a peace officer, aggravated fleeing of a law-enforcement officer,
possession of drug paraphernalia, reckless driving, driving with a
suspended license and other traffic infractions. Three days later, he
was found dead, hanging from a cloth blanket tied to a light fixture in
his cell in the medical ward of the Santa Fe County Adult Detention
Center on N.M. 14, south of Santa Fe. Sheriff Greg Solano said at the
time that Martinez was put in the medical ward because he had needle
marks on his arms and appeared to be in withdrawal, and he was on a
suicide watch where jailers were to check on him every 30 minutes. Last
week, lawyer John Faure sued on behalf of Martinez's mother, Elsie
Martinez of Santa Cruz. The complaint says Management and Training
Corp., which ran the country jail at the time, should have checked on
Martinez every 10 minutes and searched the cell to remove “any dangerous
article or clothing.” Management and Training Corp. has “maintained a
custom or policy which exhibited indifference to the constitutional
rights of person incarcerated ... which permitted or condoned deviations
from appropriate policies,” the complaint says. By hiring the company,
it says, Solano and the commission effectively violated Martinez's
constitutional rights of due process and protection from cruel and
unusual punishment. The complaint seeks “at least $10,000” for the
expenses of Martinez's funeral and burial, plus punitive and exemplary
damages for “intentional misconduct, recklessness, gross negligence,
willfulness and/or callous indifference, and/or because defendants'
conduct was motivated by malice, evil motive or intent.” Solano and a
spokesman for Management and Training Corp. in Centerville, Utah,
declined comment. The firm ran the county jail from 2001 to 2005, when
county government again took over operations. Earlier this year, the
firm was named as a defendant in a similar lawsuit brought by the
parents of Chris Roybal, who overdosed on heroin while in jail in
February 2005. It alleges Roybal got the drugs from a corrections
officer. The court record indicates that case has been transferred to
another jurisdiction.
August 29, 2007 New Mexican
When his fellow inmates at the Santa Fe County jail asked why he was
incarcerated, Dickie Ortega made an explosive statement that might have
cost him his life, lawyers said Tuesday. “He said, ‘It’s because my
cousin ratted me out,’ ” prosecutor Joseph Campbell told jurors during
opening statements Tuesday in the trial of Daniel Good, one of two men
charged with beating Ortega to death in June 2004. “There are rules in
jail,” Campbell said, “and one of these rules is that you don’t rat
somebody out.” Jeff Buckels, Good’s attorney, said Ortega’s statement
was like igniting a can of gasoline. “This was not the dorm at St.
John’s or the boys locker room at Prep,” he said. “You better believe
there are rules (in jail). One you hear over and over again is that rats
are taken care of.” The consequences were first meted out to Brad
Ortega, the man Dickie Ortega called his cousin, though they were not
actually related, Campbell said. When Brad Ortega returned to the cell
pod, he was ordered into Good’s cell and attacked by at least three men,
Campbell said. After the beating, the men ordered Brad Ortega, who
sustained a gash on his head, to strip off his bloody clothes, throw
them in the trash and take a shower, he said. Meanwhile, the men cleaned
the cell, Campbell said. While Brad Ortega was in the shower, one of the
20 inmates in the pod said he knew Brad Ortega and he was “a stand-up
guy” and “he knows the rules,” Campbell said. At that point, he said,
some of the inmates confronted and beat Dickie Ortega, a 32-year-old
from Chimayó who was being held on receiving-stolen-property and
drug-related charges. Afterward, Dickie Ortega also was ordered to strip
off his clothing and take a shower, the attorney said. Later, Good, 34,
and another inmate, Jesus Aviles-Dominguez, 31, made Dickie Ortega and
Brad Ortega fight each other, though it was not a vicious brawl,
Campbell said. After that, Good, Aviles-Dominguez and another inmate
again beat the two Ortegas, then forced them to again take off their
bloody clothes and take a shower while the cell was cleaned, he said.
Finally, Dickie Ortega was beaten a fourth time, Campbell said. That
time, he was forced against a wall and stepped on while he pleaded for
his life, the lawyer said. Brad Ortega, Campbell said, watched the last
beating, helplessly, from the upper bunk in their cell. Buckels admitted
Good “popped (Dickie Ortega) a couple times” during the beatings, but
Good didn’t kill Ortega. “In fact, he tried to stop it,” Buckels told
jurors. “He was trying to save him from a man named Chuy.” Chuy —
Aviles-Dominguez’s nickname — was the boss of the pod in which the
Ortegas had been placed, Buckels said. And during the last beating of
Dickie Ortega, Aviles-Dominguez “went berserk,” Buckels said.
Aviles-Dominguez braced himself with one hand on the sink and the other
on the bed and stomped on Dickie Ortega’s head, he said. “The violence
he dealt to Dickie Ortega was a very different kind,” Buckels said. “He
bounced his head off the concrete like a basketball. It was then that
people started getting very concerned that this guy was in trouble.”
Dickie Ortega’s mother, who was in court Tuesday, cried and held her
hands to her face when Buckels described what happened to her son.
“Daniel’s not here asking for a medal,” Buckels said. “He’s a bad boy at
a bad time in a bad place. He wasn’t nice to Dickie Ortega. He just
didn’t kill him.” After the beatings, the two Ortegas were not allowed
out of their cell, Campbell said. An inmate later alerted guards to
Dickie Ortega’s unresponsive and bloody condition, he said. Dickie
Ortega’s injuries included a subdural hematoma, liver and spleen damage
and bruising, Campbell said. Good, a Santa Fe man with a lengthy
criminal record that includes both violence and property crimes, is
charged with first-degree murder, aggravated battery causing death, two
counts of intimidation of a witness, two counts of tampering with
evidence and six counts of conspiracy. His trial is set to last 16 days,
though the days are spread out over the month of September and won’t
conclude until the end of the month. Aviles-Dominguez is scheduled to go
on trial in November for Dickie Ortega’s murder and the beating of Brad
Ortega. The District Attorney’s Office announced in May that it would
not seek the death penalty for either man. However, state District Court
Judge Tim Garcia ruled in June that if prosecutors had decided to push
for the death penalty in the case, he would have one jury decide the
defendants’ guilt or innocence and another decide their sentencing.
May 7, 2007 AP
Two lawsuits stemming from the beating death of an inmate and a female
prisoner's alleged rape at the Santa Fe County jail have been settled.
Attorney Robert Rothstein, who filed the wrongful death lawsuit on
behalf of Dickie Ortega's family, said Friday that the terms of the
settlement are confidential. An agreement reached in the lawsuit filed
on behalf of Veronica Sanchez also is confidential, attorney's with
Rothstein's firm said. Ortega, 32, died June 5, 2004, after suffering
serious head and facial injuries and a crushed larynx. He had been
arrested earlier that month on charges of receiving stolen properties.
His family sued in 2006, claiming that Santa Fe County and the company
that formerly ran its jail _ Utah-based Management and Training Corp. _
did nothing as gang members repeatedly assaulted other inmates.
Inadequate staffing, lack of supervision of inmates and lack of video
monitoring contributed to Ortega's death, the lawsuit claimed. Two men
prosecutors identified as gang members have been charged with
first-degree murder in Ortega's death. An MTC spokesman had no comment,
and a county government spokesman said county attorney Steve Ross was
unavailable to address the settlement. Federal court records show the
case was dismissed March 29 _ a day after a motion was filed by Ortega's
family, saying the plaintiffs had "settled and resolved" all disputes in
the litigation. In Sanchez's case, attorneys say the lawsuit was
dismissed Friday by agreement of all parties. Sanchez had reported that
she was raped by other inmates at the jail in 2004 and then
strip-searched after she was brought back to the jail after a hospital
exam. The lawsuit claimed the search was "utterly useless and
unnecessary and constituted further humiliation and degradation." It
also alleged negligence and civil rights violation. MTC and various
county officials were named as defendants.
July 7, 2006 New Mexican
Santa Fe County and the private company that
operated its jail until April 2005 have agreed to pay $8.5 million to
thousands of people who were strip-searched while being booked into the
jail during a three-year period. While the county and Management
Training Corp. deny in settlement documents that the blanket
strip-search policy violated the law, a class-action lawsuit filed in
January 2005 claimed it violated people's civil and constitutional
rights. Terms of the settlement dictate that MTC, which ran the jail
from October 2001 until April 2005, will pay $8 million while the county
will shell out $500,000. Lawyers Bob Rothstein, Mark Donatelli and John
Bienvenu will receive $2 million, while each of the 11 named plaintiffs
in the lawsuit will be paid $42,750. The remaining people who were strip
searched between Jan. 12, 2002 and December 2004, when the jail changed
the strip-search policy, will have 30 days from the time a U.S. District
Court judge affirms the agreement to file claims. Those people —
estimated in settlement documents to number about 13,000 — will receive
between $1,000 and $3,500. On Thursday, two of the named plaintiffs in
the suit said while they were glad the case was over, they were even
happier to have had a hand in sparing other citizens the embarrassment
and humiliation they suffered. “That’s the best thing,” said Elizabeth
“Lisa” Leyba. “That’s the thing that makes the emotional days all
right.” Said Kristi Seibold, “It feels really good. It feels like we
accomplished something — something really good and worthwhile for the
people.” Leyba, 34, a bartender at Catamount Bar and Grille, was
arrested in September 2004 for selling a beer to an underage customer
sent in during a sting. Donatelli said a bouncer at the bar was supposed
to be checking identification at the door, and the check was not Leyba’s
responsibility. At the jail, Leyba said a female officer ordered her to
strip naked and spin in a circle, which she apparently did too fast, so
the guard ordered her to do it again, slower. She then had to stand in
the room naked while the officer searched for jail clothing for her,
Leyba said. “It was one of the last things I expected to have happen to
me,” she said. “I was humiliated. It still bothers me.” Leyba, who
initially didn’t want to take part in the lawsuit, said she was
motivated to do so when she thought about her two young nieces and how
she might help spare them similar treatment. Seibold, 51, a local
massage therapist and mother of two teenagers, was strip searched twice
— once in January 2004 and again in December 2004. She was arrested for
refusing to surrender her dog to authorities and for an unpaid traffic
violation that turned out to have been paid. During one of the searches,
the female corrections officer ran her hands up and down Seibold’s arms
and legs, while the door to the room where she was being searched was
left open a crack so that anyone could have looked in, she said. Seibold
also was told to bend over during one of the searches, she said. “I felt
so exposed,” Seibold said. “I felt so violated in that they really took
their time.” Bienvenu said during his firm’s investigation of the
situation, corrections officers told him there was a peep hole in the
door to the room where the searches were conducted, and guards would
sometimes line up for a look. Santa Fe County Sheriff Greg Solano and
Kerry Dixon, the MTC warden at the time, said the searches were
conducted to stem the flow of drugs and weapons into the jail. On
Thursday, Solano said he hadn’t heard of the peep-hole allegations. In a
news release, Harry Montoya, chairman of the county commissioners, said,
“The resolution of this matter helps to put behind us lingering missteps
from the privately run jail and allows the county to continue to move
forward. We have new procedures to insure that our current strip search
policies are constitutional.” Those policies call for strip searches
only when an inmate is accused of violence, drug or weapons-related
crimes. A statement from MTC was not available Thursday. Donatelli said
the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals made it clear in 1993 that blanket
strip searches could not be conducted at county jails based on Fourth
Amendment assurances against illegal searches. Said Bienvenu: “I believe
it was a deliberate policy to ignore the law.” Rothstein said the case
marks the first class-action settlement on strip searches in New Mexico,
though his firm is handling three such pending cases in the state.
October 13, 2005 Albuquerque Journal
Bill Blank's looming presence couldn't be ignored in the back of the
crowd gathered outside the Santa Fe County Adult Detention Center on
Wednesday morning. With a large, imposing frame and a drooping mustache,
Blank listened quietly to speeches from a who's who of county officials:
County Manager Gerald González, Sheriff Greg Solano and Commission
Chairman Mike Anaya were among those who spoke before a representative
from Management and Training Corp., the private company that has been
managing the jail since 2001, handed over ceremonial keys to the
facility to county officials.
October 10, 2005 Albuquerque Journal
Santa Fe County's quest to turn around the historically troubled Santa
Fe County Adult Detention Facility is about to start its greatest test.
Management of the 668-bed jail officially changes hands on Tuesday from
Management and Training Corporation, which has been running the jail
since 2001, to Santa Fe County. The county inherits a facility that has
faced rising costs, lawsuits, unflattering audits and incidents of rape
and suicide. County commissioners and Sheriff Greg Solano, along with
Corrections Department director Greg Parrish, have repeatedly expressed
optimism that the county can do a better job than the private management
companies that have run the jail previously. Of the 148 MTC employees,
Santa Fe County hired 123 to continue working under county management.
Some were food service and medical contractors tied to MTC. Six quit,
and eight failed county background investigations. There are still 32
vacancies out of the county's 208-staff total to be filled.
September 28, 2005 Albuquerque Journal
Santa Fe County Manager Gerald González was given "emergency"
powers as the County Commission on Tuesday approved a number of
housekeeping measures in advance county government's takeover of jail
operations next month from Management and Training Corp. According to a
resolution passed unanimously by the commission, González will be able
to approve contracts for goods and services worth up to $100,000 (the
previous limit was $20,000), approve any contract that has resulted from
competitive bids or state price agreements, hire staff without
commission approval, and execute any agreement not involving expenditure
of county money. The measure was necessary for county staff to finish
everything that needs doing at the county jail, according to Deputy
County Manager Roman Abeyta, as Tuesday's meeting was the last time for
the commission to approve contracts before the Oct. 11 handover of jail
management from the private operator. Also at Tuesday's meeting, a
$200,000 contract with Correct Rx Pharmacy Services to provide
pharmaceuticals at the jail and a $68,587 contract with Inmate Transfer
Services were also approved. In addition, Neves Uniforms and Kaufmans
West were approved to provide correctional staff uniforms.
September 26, 2005 Albuquerque Journal
Santa Fe County officials estimate they will lose $5.9 million running
the adult jail next year. The year after, the projected loss is $6.4
million. But the rising deficits,
which the county has already been absorbing for years, will be only part
of the burden as county officials take over management of the
668-capacity facility Oct. 11 from Management and Training Corporation,
the Utah-based private contractor that has been running the jail since
2001. County Manager Gerald
Gonzales has an eye toward the added bureaucracy that will be required
to run what will become Santa Fe County's largest department:
corrections. Virtually none of the
news coming out the county's adult detention facility over the past
years has been good. Rising costs, lawsuits, unflattering audits, and
incidents of rape and suicide have plagued the jail. When MTC decided it
would withdraw from managing the jail earlier this year, the county had
trouble finding another private contractor who wanted the job, county
officials said. So the County Commission decided it was time to take on
the responsibility— or the burden, as some call it— of running the
jail itself. Sullivan blamed the
problem on a handful of businessmen who convinced the county to build a
jail bigger than what was needed. The current facility was completed in
1998 to expectations on the part of the County Commission that housing
prisoners would bring in revenue. "Somebody
said to the county, 'If you build it, they will come. If you build a
massive facility, the prisoners will come, and we will all make money,'
'' Solano said. Now, a completely
new set of commissioners and staff are dealing with a reality that is
quite the opposite from those expectations.
"The days of big profits from jails are gone, especially in
Santa Fe," Solano said. Under
state statute, the county is obligated to provide for the incarceration
of county prisoners. According to county officials, only 272 of the 578
inmates currently in the facility are the responsibility of Santa Fe
County to incarcerate. Solano, at least, doesn't see a whole lot of
change coming from the Oct. 11 handover. He said running the jail has
been an integral part of his job as county sheriff since he started the
job in 2002, despite its being under private management that whole time.
"I get named in all the lawsuits at the jail," he said.
"We already deal with it to such a large extent that I think it's
better we just have complete control over it anyway, because we're the
ones that have to answer for it. Private companies aren't responsible to
the public. We are."
August 25, 2005 Albuquerque
Journal
A Santa Fe County jail inmate was found dead
Wednesday afternoon hanging by a light fixture in the medical ward after
an apparent suicide, according to the Santa Fe County Sheriff's
Department. Michael Martinez, 39, of Chimayó, was
in a medical ward at the jail at the time due to sores on his arms
believed to be from drug injections, as well as for drug and alcohol
withdrawal, Solano said. Solano
said corrections officers at the jail were checking on Martinez in the
medical ward every 30 minutes Wednesday. Earlier
this year, a civil lawsuit was filed against the jail by the family of
an inmate who committed suicide there March 17, 2004.
The lawsuit was filed by the family of Juan Ignacio-Sanchez, 22,
who was in jail on a murder charge and hanged himself with his own
shoelaces in his cell, according to the suit. The suit alleges that the
jail's suicide-prevention policies were "seriously deficient"
and that Ignacio-Sanchez was not placed on a suicide watch upon his
admission to the jail, despite a phone call from his mother, who told
officials that she thought her son was suicidal.
June
23, 2005 Albuquerque Journal
About a year before homicide suspect Juan Ignacio-Sanchez hung himself
with his own shoelaces in a cell at the Santa Fe County jail, the U.S.
Department of Justice issued a report stating that the jail's suicide
prevention policies were "seriously deficient."
That's just one of the allegations in a civil lawsuit against the
jail filed Wednesday in Santa Fe District Court by attorney Robert
Rothstein, on behalf of Ignacio-Sanchez's father. Among the
lawsuit's claims are that Ignacio-Sanchez was not placed on a suicide
watch upon his admission to the jail despite a phone call to the jail
from his mother, who said she thought he was suicidal.
When a corrections officer asked her why she thought her son was
suicidal, she answered "that Ignacio-Sanchez had been crying
uncontrollably the night that he was arrested, was very depressed, tired
and confused; and he had told the police that he was going to kill
himself if he did not get help," according to the lawsuit.
Also according to court documents:
On the day of Ignacio-Sanchez's suicide at the jail, a
corrections officer took Ignacio-Sanchez's shoes, but he was allowed to
keep his shoelaces. "There
was absolutely no valid correctional justification for allowing
Ignacio-Sanchez to retain the shoelaces— particularly without the
shoes," court documents said. The lawsuit alleges that jail
staff members are responsible for maintaining a "constant awareness
of the activities of inmates they (come) into contact with" as part
of the MTC-developed "Suicide/Self-Injury Guidelines and
Procedures" at the jail. The
procedures include maintaining a continuous watch on inmates who are
under a suicide watch and removing dangerous articles or clothing that
are found in those inmates' cells, according to the suit.
May 20, 2005 AP
The Santa Fe County
Commission has decided to take over operation of its own jail this fall
when a private company that now manages the facility pulls out.
Management and Training Corp. announced last month that it would end its
contract early because operating the jail was not profitable. The
company said it couldn't keep a medical-service provider there and lost
money trying to comply with new federal mandates. The Utah-based company
is expected to end the arrangement on or before Oct. 11. Santa Fe County
officials view the change as an opportunity to improve the facility.
"We don't feel the contractor has done what needs to be done,"
Assistant County Attorney Grace Phillips told the commission Thursday
before it approved a tentative plan to take over the jail. Gregory
Parrish, director of the county corrections department, said the county
could improve the jail's tarnished public image and provide better
medical care than the private company. Government operation also could
lead to cooperation with the state and other public bodies that could
help improve medical services and keep the jail at capacity. Because the
private contractor is focused on the bottom line, Parrish said,
"sometimes their operations reflect that." The company
repeatedly fails to handle detailed tasks such as booking and billing
and simpler responsibilities such as answering phones, he said.
May 20,
2005 AP
Santa Fe County will
begin running the county's jail this fall. The County Commission decided
yesterday to take over the jail operations. Management and Training
Corporation said last month that it will prematurely end its two
year-contract to run the jail. The company says it will pull out on or
before October Eleventh. The company has said it cannot afford to
continue managing the lockup. The company is being paid $42 a day per
prisoner. County officials say they can run the jail for about the same
cost, and they believe they can do it better. Management and Training
corporation has run the jail since 2001.
May 19,
2005 Albuquerque Journal
The family of a Santa Fe County jail inmate
who died in February of an apparent heroin overdose claims the drug was
supplied by a guard. The family of Christopher
Roybal has filed a tort claim notice informing Santa Fe County and the
privately run Santa Fe County Adult Detention Center that they intend to
sue over his death. Attorney Mark Donatelli maintains in the notice that
the inmate got his drugs from former jail guard Amos Romero, 43, of
Mora, who is himself now an inmate at the jail. Romero has been charged
with twice taking money from an undercover cop in April in exchange for
delivering what he thought was cocaine into the jail. The substance was
actually a mixture containing baking soda and coffee creamer. He faces
two counts of conspiracy to traffic cocaine. Management
and Training Corp., the Utah-based private operator of the jail,
announced recently that it cannot operate the jail profitably and that
it plans to bail out of its contract to run the lockup later this year. The
tort claim notice asserts that, "Our preliminary investigation
leads us to conclude that the death of Mr. Roybal was the direct and
proximate result of the conduct of employees, officials and operators of
the Santa Fe County Adult Detention Center."
May 14,
2005 Albuquerque Journal
A man who was
incarcerated at the Santa Fe County jail earlier this week is raising
questions about whether another inmate who died at the jail was refused
medication before his apparent heart attack. Jaime
Escobar, 28, who was charged recently on a domestic violence petition,
according to court records, said Friday that he witnessed the death of
William Garrett, 62, in the jail. Garrett died of apparent cardiac
arrest Tuesday morning. Escobar, interviewed
Friday, said he was repeatedly denied his diabetes medication while in
the jail and that after Garrett suffered his cardiac arrest, other
inmates in the jail told him that Garrett had also been denied
medication. Escobar also claimed that it took jail
personnel about 15 minutes to respond after inmates called for help for
Garrett.
April
20, 2005 Albuquerque Journal
The second private
company to try and run the Santa Fe County jail at a profit -- and at
the same time in compliance with the law -- is giving up on the task.
Management and Training Corp. announced late last week that it will quit
managing the jail when its contract is up in the fall -- and would
prefer to quit sooner, if the county will allow. County Sheriff Greg
Solano says it's time the county took over operations of the jail. He's
absolutely right -- the jail has been plagued by ongoing and serious
security, sanitation and other problems under both recent private
management companies. Two years ago, the federal government pulled
prisoners out of the facility, claiming county officials were
indifferent to prisoner medical and mental health needs. The pullout
reduced the potential profit for the management company -- federal and
other prisoners are housed for fees about 30 percent higher than what
the county pays to house its local prisoners at the jail. Under MTC's
management, the jail won accreditation from the American Correctional
Association. But a murder -- the first ever at the facility -- followed
a few months later. Critics of the fad for jail and prison privatization
were busy saying, "We told you so" after MTC made its
announcement last week. In hindsight, they seem to have been right on
two important points: The jail is far too big for local needs, and the
resulting profit squeeze has translated, consistently, into
understaffing and managerial laxity on the part of the private
contractors. A year ago, the county passed an eighth-of-a-cent gross
receipts tax increase to finance increased spending on jail operations.
In response to the numerous longstanding problems, the county also put
in place a citizens advisory committee to monitor conditions there. Also
a year ago, the county took over management of the juvenile jail
facility and appears to have done a competent job there. With a funding
stream and responsible oversight in place, the county is as well
positioned as anybody to take over running the jail. It should do so
without delay.
April
20, 2005 Albuquerque Journal
Twice in the past month, a Santa Fe County jail
guard took money from an undercover officer in exchange for bringing
what he thought was cocaine to an inmate at the jail, court records
state. Amos Romero, 43, of the Antimo Trailer Park
in Mora, resigned from his job as a corrections officer at the jail
immediately after his April 17 arrest, according to Santa Fe County jail
deputy warden David Osuna. Management and Training
Corp., the Utah-based private operator of the jail, recently announced
that it cannot operate the jail profitably and told the county it is
bailing out of its contract to run the lockup.
Illegal drugs finding their way into the
jail is just one of a number of problems that have beset the privately
run jail in recent years.
April
16, 2005 New Mexican
Santa Fe County Sheriff Greg Solano's push for
the county to take over operation of the jail from a private company
received solid support Friday from members of the law-enforcement
community, who all agreed that operating a jail should be a governmental
function. However, some expressed concerns that a transition could be
bumpy, and others cautioned that a county-run jail is unlikely to be a
cure-all for all the problems. "I
agreed with Sheriff Solano that we've got to stop thinking of the jail
as a profit-maker," said state District Judge Michael Vigil.
"I don't think government should be contracting out something as
serious as our obligation to incarcerate people." "Three
different private entities have run it now and it has not worked
out," he said. "Probably because the bottom line for the
companies is profit." Fellow District Judge Stephen Pfeffer -- who,
like Vigil, handles criminal cases almost exclusively -- agreed.
"Businesses are in business for profit," he said.
"Government has to stay within a budget, but I think it's a
different focus." Santa Fe
County first contracted out the running of its jail in 1986, when the
facility was located on Airport Road, to Corrections Corporation of
America. After CCA decided not to pursue the contract for the newly
built, much-larger jail in 1997, the contract was awarded to Cornell
Corrections Inc. The current contractor -- Management Training
Corporation -- has run the facility since 2001. MTC
announced Thursday it was pulling out of its contract -- set to run
until August 2006 -- because of problems providing adequate medical
services. Those medical services were provided by yet another contractor
-- Correct Care Solutions. Solano said he'd like to see a local
medical-care provider, such as St. Vincent Regional Medical Center or
Presbyterian Medical Services contract with the county to provide care
at the jail.
April
15, 2005 Albuquerque Journal
Management and Training Corp., saying it can't operate the Santa Fe
County jail profitably, has given notice to county officials that it's
bailing out of its contract to run the lockup. Utah-based MTC said it
wasn't getting a sufficient number of inmates at the jail and the county
wasn't paying the company enough to cover costs. "Low inmate
occupancy numbers and the costs of additional operating requirements
have made it impossible for MTC to continue to manage the
facility," said Al Murphy, an MTC vice president. County
Sheriff Greg Solano said now it's time for the county to take over jail
operations rather than relying on a contractor. "We have to give up
the idea of the jail as a profit center," Solano said.
Solano also wants local health care
providers to partner with the county to provide medical services for
prisoners, which the sheriff said is one of the most difficult issues at
the jail. MTC took over operation of the jail from
Cornell Companies of Texas in 2001. The contract was renewed last fall,
but MTC spokesman Carl Stuart said the company can opt out annually. MTC
is willing to run the jail for another six months to fulfill the
contract but also would leave earlier if the county wants, Stuart said.
Stuart said MTC expected to have an average of 600 inmates at the jail—
which can hold at least 650 prisoners— but that the prisoner
population has been running at an average of 540 in recent months.
Santa Fe County's own prisoners average
about 300 or 320 a day, Solano said. MTC has "had problems getting
inmates from other areas to make a profit," he said.
Santa Fe attorney Mark Donatelli, who
recently filed a lawsuit over the jail's former policy of
strip-searching all inmates, said he and others warned county officials
years ago that the jail was too large "and would become an economic
albatross." "And that's what it turned out to be,"
Donatelli said. County Manager Gerald González said MTC's announcement
was not a shock. This week, Correct Care Solutions, the current medical
provider at the jail, notified MTC it planned to pull out because it
cannot meet medical requirements under the present reimbursement
allowance. "We knew they were having difficulty with medical, so
from that standpoint it was not a complete surprise," González
said. Donatelli said one problem with hiring
private companies to run jails or prisons is that public agencies like
the county lose corrections expertise and it can be difficult to resume
public management. Solano said county management
would help retain jail employees because of better benefits, including
the retirement plan available through New Mexico's public employee
system. He noted that the county took over operations at the juvenile
jail about a year ago. MTC said one of its accomplishments was winning
American Correctional Association accreditation for the jail last year.
But an inmate was killed in an alleged beating by other inmates in June,
apparently the first-ever slaying at the county jail.
April 14,
2005 AP
The company managing the Santa Fe County Jail announced Thursday it will
end its two-year contract early. Executives
for Management & Training Corporation said they cannot afford to
continue managing the facility at the rate of $42 per day per inmate,
considering the 650-bed jail houses only an average of 450 inmates. They
said the contract is not profitable and they will end the agreement in
six months. Santa Fe County Sheriff Greg L. Solano said Thursday the
company's early departure was disappointing because it had just started
just six months ago. However, the change could be an opportunity for the
county to take over the jail, which has a $9.6 million budget. "We
need to take control of this facility and put its destiny into our own
hands," Solano said. The U.S. Justice Department, which monitors
the jail's management, released a report in March 2003 alleging that
county officials were indifferent to prisoners' medical and mental
health needs. The county denied the allegations, but made changes to its
program. Solano said he believes local medical providers would serve the
jail better than out-of-state contractors. "We ought to get out of
the business of running a jail for profit and just try to operate the
best jail," Solano said.
April 6, 2005
Albuquerque Journal
A woman formerly employed at the Santa Fe County jail
showed up in court drunk Monday to testify whether a female inmate was
being denied emergency medical treatment for a life-threatening
illness. Santa
Fe public defender Damien Horne said that Rose Bell-Engle, 48, a former
health services administrator for the county jail, first lied to Santa
Fe District Judge Michael Vigil about whether she had drunk any alcohol.
But then Bell-Engle blew a 0.09 blood
alcohol level on two Breathalyzer tests administered to her at the
court, according to Santa Fe County Sheriff Greg Solano. The legal limit
for driving while intoxicated in New Mexico is a 0.08 blood alcohol
level. Solano said Tuesday that Bell-Engle had
resigned from her job at the jail before Monday's hearing. She was
employed at the jail by Correct Care Solutions, the subcontractor for
medical services hired by the jail's private manager, the Utah-based
Management & Training Co.
February
26, 2005 Albuquerque Journal
A Santa Fe County Sheriff's corporal said in court
Friday that a 23-year-old man has admitted to using heroin at the Santa
Fe County jail on the same date that his best friend, also an inmate at
the jail, died of what authorities have said is a possible heroin
overdose.
Rocky Romero, 23, was in court Friday to face sentencing on
charges of leading Santa Fe County sheriff's deputies on two vehicle
chases last year.
During Romero's
sentencing, Santa Fe County Sheriff's Cpl. Vanessa Pacheco told Santa Fe
District Judge Stephen Pfeffer that Romero has admitted to using heroin
on Feb. 17 and at other times during the week of Feb. 14 to Feb. 18. Romero's
best friend, Chris Roybal, 37, who was staying in the same dormitory pod
as Romero the week ending Feb. 18, was found dead in his cell on Feb.
18. Roybal's death is being investigated as a possible heroin overdose,
according to Santa Fe County Sheriff Greg Solano. According
to a news release from the sheriff's department, inmates at the jail
have told investigators that Roybal was using heroin on Feb. 17 before
he was found dead on Feb. 18. During the investigation, a syringe was
found behind a hollowed-out brick wall in the dormitory where Roybal was
being held, according to the sheriff's department.
Solano has called Roybal's death a
"suspected overdose" and added that Roybal showed no outward
signs of trauma that could have contributed to his death.
February
24, 2005 Albuquerque Journal
Two men who potentially face
the death penalty if found guilty of killing a fellow inmate at the
Santa Fe County jail last year were unusually loquacious during a court
hearing Wednesday. Prosecutors
called for the hearing before First Judicial District Judge Tim Garcia
because they believe that court documents made available to the two
defendants have been disseminated to a wider audience and could be used
to "threaten the lives of witnesses and/or defendants,"
according to the motion.
But defendant Jesus Aviles-Dominguez, who
is charged in connection with the June 4 beating death of fellow Santa
Fe County jail inmate Dickie Ortega, denied any such activity.
He told a reporter, "We don't have no
fax machines in our pods." Good said that at the time of Ortega's
death, he was three days away from being released from jail. Good is now
being housed at the state penitentiary. Good said that his treatment at
the prison is better than it was at the Santa Fe County jail.
When pressed for details about the case, Good became tight
lipped. "No comment, not
guilty, see you at trial," Good said.
February 19,
2005 Albuquerque Journal
A Santa Fe County jail inmate was found dead in his cell early Friday,
and fellow inmates are claiming the deceased man took heroin on
Thursday, according to the Santa Fe County Sheriff's Department.
Chris Roybal, 37, was found dead just before 3 a.m. on Friday
after a fellow inmate notified a guard that Roybal "normally snores
loudly and was too quiet and something may be wrong with him,"
according to the sheriff's department. On
Friday, Roybal's former attorney, Sydney West, said Roybal had "a
long and documented heroin problem."
January 13,
2005 Albuquerque Journal
Among the former Santa Fe County jail inmates who were forced to
strip naked under the jail's former blanket strip-search policy,
according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday, was 49-year-old Kristi Siebold.
The crime that brought Siebold to the jail? Refusal to give her
dog to animal control, the civil rights lawsuit states.
Another defendant in attorney Mark Donatelli's class action suit
against the jail and its private management firm is David Sandoval, a
39-year-old machinist at Los Alamos National Laboratory who underwent
two strip searches after being arrested on a charge of stealing a casino
gambling chip, a charge he was later cleared of.
Another plaintiff is a 45-year-old writer and film producer who
had never been arrested before. She was taken into custody in November
when a bench warrant was erroneously issued for her arrest on a charge
of failing to appear for a court date, the suit says.
The woman was "taken to the jail where she was ordered to
strip completely naked, put her arms over her head and turn around for
visual inspection," according to Donatelli.
"She was then required to lift each of her breasts for
additional visual inspection, to bend over and cough. This woman also,
while completely naked, was subjected to an officer placing her hands on
the woman's legs and genital area for a further physical
examination."
Donatelli alleges that none of the plaintiffs named in his suit
were admitted to the jail for violent offenses, and none were found to
be in possession of any contraband after they were forced to strip nude.
Donatelli estimates that hundreds of people, presumed innocent after
their arrests, have likely had to endure the "horribly
demeaning" experience of having to strip naked.
January 6,
2004 Albuquerque Journal
A 31-year-old man who was arrested on prostitution charges on
Cerrillos Road New Year's Eve has alleged that he was raped by an
unknown assailant while in custody at the Santa Fe County jail early
Sunday morning.
December
30, 2004 Albuquerque Journal
A civil rights attorney says he will file a class-action lawsuit on
behalf of all individuals who were forced to strip naked under the Santa
Fe County Jail's former policy of strip-searching anyone booked into the
jail. Santa Fe attorney Mark Donatelli's Wednesday announcement that he
plans the class-action litigation comes after the jail recently
abandoned its policy of strip-searching each and every inmate during
booking. Donatelli contends that
it was unconstitutional for the jail to have a blanket policy of
strip-searching all inmates, arguing that individuals under arrest have
a right to privacy and are presumed innocent of their charges in the
eyes of the law. The
jail's former practice of strip-searching every inmate during booking
first came to light in September, after the Journal reported that a
cocktail waitress at a Santa Fe bar was strip-searched following her
arrest on a charge of selling alcohol to a minor. During an
interview after her arrest, Leyba said she was forced to strip naked,
"no socks, nothing," after her Sept. 4 arrest. The search was
performed by female corrections officers, Leyba said.
In November, Jamie Taylor, 22, of Santa Fe also came forward and
reported that male corrections officers ordered her to strip naked for a
search after her June arrest on a DWI charge. But Taylor said that after
she protested, the male corrections officers backed off and did not go
through with the search.
Donatelli said there is potentially a large number of inmates and
former inmates whose rights were violated at the county jail when they
were ordered to strip naked.
December
14, 2004 Albuquerque Journal
A woman who says she was raped by two inmates at the Santa Fe County
jail while she was incarcerated there earlier this year has notified the
county and the jail's private manager that she intends to sue for
damages. Veronica Sanchez has
alleged that she was sexually assaulted at the Santa Fe County jail in
September. According to her tort claim notice, she "was raped by at
least two men after being trapped inside a cell containing approximately
eight to eleven male detainees." Sanchez's tort claim says after
she was raped, "she was then removed and placed, alone, in a
different cell, where she was left for about two hours before being
transported to the hospital for an examination, during which time the
various personnel who were responsible for her safety scrambled to
concoct an explanation for her rape which would leave them somehow
blameless," reads the tort claim notice.
"Only after she became hysterical, curled up on the floor,
and started kicking at the door and screaming was she finally let out of
the cell and taken to the hospital by ambulance." After Sanchez was
raped, the detention officer who put her in the wrong cell,
"immediately denied putting her in that cell."
A medical officer at the jail also is quoted in Donatelli's tort
claim as saying that a detention officer approached him at the jail the
night of the rape, and told him that he "lost" Sanchez in the
jail, and that "he knew he should not have had male and female
detainees out of booking cells at the same time, but that his supervisor
told him just to handle it on his own."
November
23, 2004 AP
The American Correctional Association says the Santa Fe County jail
violated its standards by strip searching a waitress booked on a charge
of serving alcohol to minors. Waitress
Lisa Leyba, who notified the county earlier this month that she intends
to sue, contends she was ordered to remove all her clothes and turn
around in front of a female guard. Some people who have been strip
searched at New Mexico jails have won settlements.
For example, Diana Archuleta, a supervisor at Las Vegas Medical
Center, settled a case against San Miguel County early this year for
more than $80,000 after winning a summary judgment, said her attorney,
Shannon Oliver of Albuquerque. State
District Judge Jay Harris ruled the Las Vegas jail's policy of strip
searching everyone booked into the jail is unconstitutional. Phil Davis,
legal co-director for the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico,
has represented plaintiffs in several strip-search cases and has settled
them all. "The law is clear
that you need some kind of suspicion to strip search any inmate,
particularly one brought in for a relatively minor offense," Davis
said.
November
20, 2004 Albuquerque Journal
A 36-year-old Santa Fe woman was mistakenly released from jail Thursday
by giving a detention officer a bond receipt from a prior arrest,
according to a report from the Santa Fe County Sheriff's Department.
The woman, Connie Gonzales, was still at large Friday afternoon,
and she will be additionally charged with escape from jail.
November
18, 2004 Albuquerque Journal
The Santa Fe County jail's practice of strip searching all inmates is
unconstitutional, according to a tort claim notice sent to the jail by
an attorney for a local cocktail waitress who says she was ordered to
strip nude after her September arrest for serving alcohol to a minor.
Catamount Bar & Grille cocktail waitress Lisa Leyba, 32,
spent 14 hours at the jail Sept. 4, charged with a fourth-degree felony
after she sold beers to two underage customers during an undercover
sting operation by police.
In a phone interview Wednesday, Leyba's attorney, Mark Donatelli
said, "It's hard to believe that in the middle of purported jail
improvements, the county starts forcing people to take their clothes off
in violation of the Constitution." "Specifically, she was
taken to a room and ordered to disrobe," reads Donatelli's tort
claim. "Ms. Leyba removed her clothes and stood in the middle of
the room in her undergarments and socks. She was then told that this was
insufficient and was ordered to take off all her undergarments and socks
and to rotate so that the officer could observe her entire body."
Santa Fe County jail warden Kerry Dixon, who works for the jail's
private manager, the Utah-based Management & Training Co., could not
be reached for comment Wednesday. During a brief phone conversation
Wednesday, Dixon said he wanted to first speak with an attorney before
commenting, but he did not call back and subsequently could not be
reached for comment. "We have since learned that what happened to
Ms. Leyba was caused by a recently implemented policy of conducting
strip searches of all incoming pre-trial detainees," reads
Donatelli's tort claim notice. "As I am sure you know, this
categorical and indiscriminate practice expressly violates the 4th and
14th amendments to the United States Constitution as well as the New
Mexico Constitution." Another young woman who was interviewed
Wednesday, Jamie Taylor, 22, said that a male corrections officer
ordered her to strip after her June arrest on a driving while
intoxicated charge. Taylor said the corrections officer claimed the
female guards were busy, "so he had to do it." Taylor said
that when she stood up for herself, the corrections officer backed off.
"The male guy tried to make me strip in front of him,"
Taylor said. "I told him I know my rights, and that if he tried to
make me strip I would immediately look into filing a lawsuit."
Leyba's tort claim notice claims that the jail's policy of
conducting strip searches of all pre-trial detainees "was caused in
part by the joint decision of county officials and MTC to bring in an
administration headed by a warden whose only corrections experience was
in operating prisons housing convicted felons and not a jail housing
pre-trial detainees who are presumed innocent of any crimes."
October
29, 2004 Albuquerque Journal
A Santa Fe man accuses a Santa Fe County sheriff's deputy of mistaking a
preexisting brain injury for intoxication and arresting him for drunken
driving after a 2002 traffic crash, according to a civil lawsuit filed
Wednesday.
The suit states that Lawrence Martinez was involved in an Oct.
28, 2002, crash with another vehicle while he was headed west on Las
Estrellas Road. It also states that county jail guards beat and kicked
Martinez. The jail's private manager, the Utah-based Management &
Training Corp., also is named as a defendant in the lawsuit.
October
28, 2004 Albuquerque Journal
The U.S. Department of Justice won't sue Santa Fe
County, as long as it adheres to a 30-page memorandum of understanding
that has taken more than a year to negotiate over management of the
county jail. The agreement
outlines policies and protocols covering a range of issues from health
care and suicide prevention to security and staff training.
Santa Fe County commissioners approved the document Tuesday, but
the federal government has yet to sign off on it. The jail has
been under Justice Department scrutiny for some time. In March 2003, the
federal agency released a scathing report charging that the county was
deliberately indifferent to the inmates' medical and mental health needs
and suffered harm or risk from the detention center's suicide
prevention, fire safety and sanitation systems.
Federal inmates were subsequently pulled from the facility.
The jail has had other problems recently as well. Earlier this month, a
woman alleged she was raped by another inmate in an area of booking
where no security cameras were in place. And a 32-year-old prisoner was
beaten to death by other inmates in June.
The death occurred in a section of the jail the Justice
Department identified as being understaffed two years ago.
However, when the county renegotiated its contract with jail operator
Management and Training Corp. on Oct. 1, the new contract reflected many
of the Department of Justice's recommendations.
As a result, the cost of operating the jail will increase this
year by nearly $1.5 million, county finance director Susan Lucero said.
October 6,
2004 Albuquerque Journal
An attorney for a woman who claims she was raped by a fellow inmate at
the Santa Fe County jail last week says the sheriff's department has a
conflict of interest in investigating the case.
The Santa Fe County Sheriff's Department should not be
investigating the rape report because the sheriff will be named in a
resulting civil lawsuit, her attorney Mark Donatelli said Tuesday.
The sheriff will be named in the suit because as the county's
agent, he is ultimately responsible for what goes on at the privately
run county jail, Donatelli said. Donatelli
said he intends to file suit against Solano, the county and the jail's
private manager, the Utah-based Management and Training Corp.
October 1,
2004 Albuquerque Journal
Officials at the Santa Fe County jail should never have allowed a female
inmate to have contact with a male inmate during an incident Tuesday
night when she alleges she was raped in a booking area, her attorney
said.
Female and male inmates are, at least theoretically, "not
allowed to mix" at the jail, said attorney Mark Donatelli. "How
hard is it to have physical separation at the jail?" Donatelli
asked. There are two main problems at the jail, Donatelli said— a lack
of staffing and a lack of money to commit to hire and retain quality
personnel. During an incident in 2001, guards allowed a female
inmate into her inmate boyfriend's cell so they could have sex. This
happened under the jail's former private manager, Cornell Corrections.
And in March, former inmate Juanita Martinez alleged in a lawsuit
that she became pregnant in 2001 after she was raped at the jail by a
guard and other inmates. Both Cornell Corrections and MTC are named as
plaintiffs in that lawsuit.
September 30,
2004 Santa Fe New Mexican
A
44-year-old woman claims she was raped in the booking area of the Santa
Fe County jail Tuesday night after guards left her alone with male
inmates, Sheriff Greg Solano said. Both
Solano and jail Warden Kerry Dixon refused to say exactly what happened.
The booking area has two sections -- one where prisoners are
initially brought and a second where holding cells are located, Solano
said. The alleged attack
took place in the second section, where a corrections officer should
always be on duty, Dixon said. "However,
last night we did not (have anyone on duty)," he said. "It
initially appears to me that we had some procedural errors."
"I'm extremely concerned and embarrassed," said Dixon, who was
hired as warden seven months ago. "Everything I've worked to do
here is going to go right down the drain because of incidents like
this."
September 30,
2004 Albuquerque Journal
A female inmate at the Santa Fe County jail has alleged that a male
inmate raped her in the facility's booking area Tuesday night, according
to the Santa Fe County Sheriff's Department. The
alleged rape occurred in the jail's booking area between 9:44 and 11
p.m. Tuesday.
August 31,
2004 Santa Fe New Mexican
A lawyer has sent a letter warning Santa Fe County and the private
company that runs its jail to expect a lawsuit from the family of a man
beaten to death in the facility earlier this summer. Dickie Ortega’s
death in the Santa Fe County Adult Detention Center resulted from a lack
of adequate staffing, lack of inmate supervision, lack of video
monitoring of some jail areas, inadequate policies regarding inmate
classification and problems with hiring , training and supervision of
corrections officers, Santa Fe attorney Bob Rothstein wrote in a Friday
letter.
August 26,
2004 Albuquerque Journal
The Santa Fe District Attorney's Office is seeking the death penalty
against two county jail inmates who are accused of beating a fellow
inmate to death. The inmate was slain on June 6 because they
thought he was an informant, according to court records. Attorney
Mark Donatelli has said he plans on filing a civil lawsuit against the
jail's private manager, the Utah-based Management and Training Corp.,
and Santa Fe County, for negligence in connection with Dickie Ortega's
death. On Wednesday, Santa Fe County Sheriff Greg Solano, who
oversees the jail, said that staffing is being increased at the
jail.
August
11, 2004 Albuquerque Journal
Escalating costs at the Santa Fe County jail are likely to consume new
revenue from a gross receipts tax hike approved by county commissioners
last month in just 21/2 to four years, commissioners determined
Tuesday. "Well, that's really depressing," said County
Commissioner Jack Sullivan, who crunched some numbers during the
commission meeting. If the county inmate population continues
growing, and the number of inmates coming from the state Corrections
Department shrinks, the county will see recurring increases of more than
$1 million each year to pay its private operator, Management and
Training Corp.
July 28, 2004
Albuquerque Journal
The Santa Fe County Commission on Tuesday unanimously approved a tax
hike to help fund operations at the county jail. The one-eighth
percent increase in the gross receipts tax will mean an additional 12.5
cents on a $100 purchase in Santa Fe County. The new tax rate will go
into effect Jan. 1, 2005, unless voters petition the county to hold a
referendum on the increase. County officials estimate the tax hike
will generate an additional $4 million a year, which would be earmarked
for the county's correctional facilities. The county contracts
with a private company, Utah-based Management and Training Corp., to run
the adult jail. The adult jail has been the subject of state and
federal audits harshly criticizing medical care and security at the
facility. Also under the new proposal, the county will increase
the amount of money it pays per prisoner. The new per diem rate,
currently $41 per prisoner per day, will increase to $42. There
are nearly 600 inmates currently at the jail. About 400 of those are
county inmates, and the remainder are prisoners housed under contract
with other agencies.
June 28, 2004
Albuquerque Journal
As "tough negotiations" with Santa Fe County's private jail
contractor grind on, some county officials are revisiting the notion
that the county itself should resume jail operations. County
Commissioner Paul Duran thinks the county would do a better job running
the jail now. "I have always thought that the county should
take it over," Duran said. Duran expressed similar thoughts
last year when the county's Corrections Advisory Committee issued its
annual report. It concluded that Utah-based MTC-- a for-profit company--
was not providing enough medical staffing or case managers to deal with
inmates needs. This year's report, while noting some progress,
raised the same concerns. "I think it's the profit element
that is the root of all these problems," Duran said in a recent
interview. The jail's troubles have been well-documented in recent
years, with state and federal audits slamming the facility for
inadequate medical services and security procedures. MTC currently
subcontracts another company, Physicians Network Association, to provide
health care services at the jail. PNA will not return if and when the
county and MTC reach a new agreement, jail administrators have
said.
June 26, 2004
Albuquerque Journal
The Santa Fe County jail is making changes following an incident earlier
this month that left one inmate dead.
The jail, run by Management and Training Corp., has changed rules for
prisoners. Among them, inmates are not allowed in their neighbor's
cell at any time and rules governing when inmates can enter and exit
cells in three of the jail's four housing units have changed, Deputy
Warden David Osuna said. On June 6, four inmates in the jail's
highest-security housing pod allegedly dragged two other inmates from a
recreational area into a cell and severely beat them. Dickie M. Ortega,
32, of Chimayo died at a Santa Fe hospital after suffering head and
facial injuries and a crushed larynx. His cousin, 29-year-old Brad
Ortega, was injured. Four inmates were charged with murder and
aggravated battery. They are Daniel Good, 31, Jesus Aviles-Dominguez,
28, Joe Corriz, 36, all of Santa Fe, and Lawrence Gallegos, 25. There
was no hometown listed for Gallegos. Aviles-Dominguez also was charged
with tampering with evidence. Along with rule changes at the jail,
Management and Training Corp. said it has added two supervising
corrections officers to each day shift.
June 12, 2004
Albuquerque Journal
The Santa Fe County jail pod where an inmate was killed on June 4 was
staffed with a requisite number of guards-- the same number that was
sufficient to win accreditation from the American Correctional
Association after a February inspection, according to the county
sheriff. Attorney Mark Donatelli, whose law firm is representing
Ortega's family in a pending civil lawsuit, said Friday that inadequate
staffing and supervision of inmates could have contributed to Ortega's
fatal beating. Donatelli also said that ACA accreditation is
"like have having a sticker on a used car that says it runs good;
that's about it." A 2002 Department of Justice report
identified nine incidents of violence at the jail that can be attributed
to a lack of supervision, Donatelli said.
November 19,
2003 Santa Fe New Mexican
Guards at the Santa Fe County jail say they found an inmate with
black-tar heroin inside the jail Monday afternoon. Albert Ponce, 28, who
is from southern New Mexico, has been charged with possession of a
controlled substance, according to undersheriff Robert Garcia. Police
reports indicate a guard at the jail saw Ponce and another inmate walk
out of a janitor's closet at the jail Monday afternoon. Another guard
reportedly patted both inmates down and found a small sheet of folded
paper with the heroin inside it taped to Ponce's body under his
jail-issue clothing. It was too early to know how the heroin found its
way into the jail, Garcia said, but drugs inside the facility are not
uncommon.
November 15,
2003 Santa Fe New Mexican
Nine months after the U.S. Department of Justice found health-care
deficiencies at Santa Fe County's jail, problems remain. The department
still won't allow the jail to house federal prisoners, whose removal
earlier this year cut off a source of revenue for the 682-bed
adult-detention center south of the city. Officials say solving the
jail's medical-care problems will likely call for a greater investment
from the county government, which already has felt a drag on its budget,
and more cooperation from community health-care providers. The company
that provides health services is not performing routine exams for
prisoners locked up in the county-owned, privately-operated jail, and in
many cases, inmates are being cared for by emergency medical
technicians, who have less training than nurses, officials say.
September 2,
2003 Santa Fe New Mexican
Santa Fe County’s private prison operator has 30 days to come up with
a corrective-action plan to address issues raised in a recent audit by
the state Department of Corrections, the department announced Friday.
Corrections Secretary Joe Williams said workers who inspected the Santa
Fe County Adult Detention Center two weeks ago found that Management and
Training Corp. has made strides in improving security at the jail since
the state threatened to remove its inmates from the facility earlier
this summer. But Williams wants the Utah-based operator to work harder
at complying with contractual obligations regarding programs and
services, he said in a written statement Friday.
August 14,
2003 Albuquerque Journal
The family of Tyson Johnson, in a federal lawsuit filed Monday, claim
that instead of tending to his psychiatric care during a 17-day stay in
the Santa Fe County jail, staff there neglected and even taunted him to
end his life. The 26-page document, filed in U.S. District Court in
Santa Fe on behalf of Johnson's mother and his two young children,
details the 27-year-old man's last days, during which he repeatedly
pleaded for help. The lawsuit claims those cries fell on deaf ears.
Johnson ended up hanging himself the morning of Jan. 13 with a
"suicide proof" blanket inside a padded cell, despite being
placed on a suicide watch.
July 27, 2003
Albuquerque Journal
Jail guards or civilians who help bring illegal narcotics into the Santa
Fe County jail might wind up spending time there as inmates. And inmates
who bring drugs in will be caught and face a longer list of criminal
charges. That's the message Santa Fe County Sheriff Greg Solano hopes to
send after he announced that 12 defendants either face or will face
criminal charges as a result of an ongoing six-month investigation into
drug smuggling into the Santa Fe County jail by a task force headed by
Lt. Marco Lucero. Six defendants have already been arrested and charged
in connection with the operations, including one former jail
guard.
July 22,
2003 Santa Fe New Mexican
Friends and families of inmates at the Santa Fe County Detention Center
were kept from visiting the prisoners Sunday because the jail was short
of guards. Warden Steve Hargett said visitors weren't allowed at the
jail because two correctional officers unexpectedly had to take an
inmate to the hospital. One guard had already called in sick when the
medical emergency occurred, which left too few guards to supervise
visits, he said.
July 11, 2003
Albuquerque Journal
More bad news arrived Wednesday at the Santa Fe County Adult Detention
Center, where a surprise state inspection discovered "serious
security issues," according to the state Corrections Department.
County Sheriff Greg Solano and Corrections Department spokeswoman Tia
Bland declined Thursday to specify the problems found in the unannounced
audit. Corrections Secretary Joe R. Williams and Solano plan to address
the media today, Bland said.
June 18, 2003 Santa Fe New
Mexican
A 39-year-old jail guard has been placed on paid administrative leave
after an inmate alleged Saturday he sexually assaulted her. The guard
hasn't been charged with a crime, Santa Fe County Sheriff Greg Solano
said. The investigation will probably take a long time, Solano said. The
inmate told police the guard touched her intimately Friday. She also
said the guard sexually assaulted her outside the jail, Solano said
Monday.
August 26,
2002 Albuquerque Journal
More than 140 inmates at the Santa Fe County Adult Detention Center were
placed on lockdown following an alleged assault of a correctional by two
inmates Sunday afternoon. Correctional Officer Felipe Romero was taken
to St.Vincent Hospital after he was kicked and punched by two federal
inmates about 1:15 p.m. Parrish said the lockdown, which confined
inmates to their cells, would stay in place until jail officials met
with representatives of Management Training Corporation, which has been
hired by the county to operate the center.
December 11,
2001 Albuquerque Journal
The Santa Fe County jail has fired two former corrections officers in
the mistaken release in late October of a prisoner accused of rape. Greg
Parrish, county correctional services manager, said in early November
that jail officials had obtained a release order for a Javier Gonzales
accused of shoplifting, but the wrong inmate was let go. "Two
employees of (Management Training Corp.) were dismissed," Parrish
said. "It doesn't appear that there's any criminal intent
involved." Parrish was hired by the county to act as a liaison with
the privately run jail after Utah-based Management and Training Corp.
assumed its management in October.
November 8,
2001Santa Fe New Mexican
As police continue to look for escaped Santa Fe County Detention Center
inmate Javier Gonzalez, officials at the jail say they have taken the
first steps toward making sure a similar incident never happens again.
Management and Training Corp. officials have reassigned staff members
and have assigned a new lieutenant to the booking department to make
sure employees follow procedures correctly.
Taft Correctional Institution,
Taft, California
June 13, 2009 Anchorage Daily-News
Former Rep. Vic Kohring says he still supports private prisons even
as his enthusiasm clashes with his own observations from inside one,
where he said equipment went unrepaired, meals lacked fresh produce and
prisoner welfare appeared to take a back seat to saving money. "That's
the downside of the private-run facility," said Kohring, two days after
he left the privately run Taft Correctional Institution in Taft, Calif.
"There was a certain amount of indifference there." Kohring spent about
10 months at the low-security camp at Taft following his conviction on
federal corruption charges in 2007. He and former House Speaker Pete
Kott were freed last week while they argue that their bribery
convictions should be overturned because prosecutors failed to give them
favorable evidence uncovered by the FBI. Their first court hearing will
be Wednesday, though it will mainly deal with their conditions for
release, not the substance of their arguments. Kott was held in a prison
camp owned and operated by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons at Sheridan, Ore.
Kott hasn't responded to interview requests. Kohring was in the process
of transferring from Taft to Sheridan when release orders were issued
Thursday by U.S. District Judge John Sedwick of Anchorage. On Friday,
after reporting to probation officers in Anchorage, Kohring spoke
extensively with a reporter about his year inside the federal
corrections system. Taft is a federally owned facility in the California
desert. It opened in 1997 as a demonstration project to test how private
companies could operate a federal prison. Wackenhut Corrections and Geo
Group Inc. held contracts there. In 2007, Management & Training Corp., a
privately held company based in Centerville, Utah, took over operations
under a four-year, $144 million contract. "It seemed pretty apparent
they were cutting -- they were trying to be ultra-efficient, cutting
back as much as they could," Kohring said. "If things would break down,
they'd stay broken down for a long time -- exercise equipment,
telephones." Meals were loaded with carbohydrates, "too many processed
foods, not enough fresh produce," he said. "There was a lot of
complaints that the food there wasn't up to par, at least not in
comparison to, say, Sheridan." Kohring also said that medical care was
inadequate. "I witnessed some pretty bad injuries when I was in Taft
there. Guys falling over, one guy broke his femur, another broke his
hip, one guy was punched in the face and he had glass embedded in his
eye and it took him about a day before they finally took him to the
doctor, at Bakersfield, in the hospital. It was horrid." His own
pre-existing back and neck injury, from a car accident, got him neither
sympathy nor care, he said. "My back didn't get any kind of attention at
all, other than ibuprofen. I was told by the director of medical to shut
up ... They said no to everything." He was warned that if he kept
complaining, he'd wind up cleaning the kitchen, he said. Carl Stuart,
communication director for Management & Training Corp., said Saturday
that his company does what's required under its federal contracts.
Bureau of Prisons officials regularly inspect its operations, and some
contract prisons have full-time, on-site government monitors, though he
didn't know if that was the case in Taft. Willacy County Adult Correctional Facility,
Raymondville, Texas
June 28, 2009 Brownsville Herald
It took about five years, but state Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr. seems to
have phased out his paid consulting jobs for construction and
engineering firms. Last year, however, he still received at least
$25,000 in consulting fees from the Houston-based TEDSI Infrastructure
Group, according to his personal financial statement on file with the
Texas Ethics Commission. "I was fulfilling a prior obligation on a
contract that I had with TEDSI which expired in 2008," Lucio wrote in a
statement to The Brownsville Herald Wednesday. Lucio, D-Brownsville, did
not say what he did for the firm, but in 2002 said that he would set up
meetings and introduce the firm to officials in Brownsville. In 2004
amid mounting criticism of possible conflicts of interest, Lucio told
the Herald that he would phase out consulting for firms that do business
in the Rio Grande Valley and the state. Besides consulting for TEDSI,
Lucio also was retained by CorPlan Corrections of Dallas, Management &
Training Corp. of Utah, Aguirre Inc. of Dallas, and Dannenbaum
Engineering Corp. of Houston. At the start of 2005, Lucio severed ties
with CorPlan, Aguirre, and MTC amid federal inquiries into the federal
detention center in Willacy County. A Webb County commissioner and two
former Willacy County commissioners were convicted of bribery. Companies
involved in the project were not accused of any wrongdoing. Lucio also
stopped consulting for Dannenbaum, which he said he introduced to the
Brownsville Navigation District. The BND paid Dannenbaum $15.4 million
of $21.4 million spent toward developing a still non-existent
international bridge at the Port of Brownsville. But, he continued
consulting for TEDSI until last year. Lucio's prior financial statements
show that in 2007 TEDSI paid him from $10,000 to $24,999 and $25,000 or
more in prior years. Lucio had been on CorPlan's payroll since 1999.
Aguirre, MTC and Dannenbaum then contracted him, but in interviews prior
to 2004 he wouldn't specifically say when or how much each paid him. It
was not until 2004 that Lucio started specifically listing the companies
that retained him in his financial statements and these, coupled with
prior interviews with the senator, reflect that the five firms paid him
at least $340,000. Embattled former Willacy County District Attorney
Juan Angel Guerra obtained an indictment against Lucio last year,
charging him with profiting from the elected office. Administrative
Judge Manuel Bañales Jr. dismissed the indictment following arguments
from Lucio's attorney, Michael R. Cowen, that the indictment was
defective and that Guerra was seeking revenge against those who he
perceived to be his political enemies.
December 13, 2008 Brownsville Herald
This year's Willacy County grand jury investigation into alleged
criminal activity surrounding for-profit prisons and high-profile public
officials is not the first, and District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra said
it is tied to an earlier investigation. A federal inquiry resulting in
convictions in 2005 stirred up a dust storm in Raymondville when it
looked into a money-for-votes and bribery scheme to favor firms involved
in the Willacy County Adult Correctional Center, a project that started
in 2000. The firms, which did business in Texas and were involved in the
project, were CorPlan Corrections, Aguirre Inc., Management & Training
Corp., and Hale-Mills Construction, according to Guerra and public
records. That federal investigation resulted in the bribery conviction
of former Webb County commissioner David Cortez - identified in federal
court records as the representative of "a company" - who gave $39,000
over three years from 2000 to 2003 to several officials to secure their
votes on the Commissioners Court for the firm's participation in the
jail project. However, that firm is never mentioned by name in the court
record. Federal officials would not discuss the case, so the reason for
the omission could not be learned. Among the officials who received
money in return for favoring a jail consultant - also unnamed in the
court record - and whom Cortez represented were Israel Tamez of
Raymondville, at that time a Willacy County commissioner, and the late
Jose Jimenez of Sebastian, also a Willacy commissioner. Cortez, Tamez
and Jimenez all pleaded guilty, the federal court record shows. U.S.
District Judge Andrew S. Hanen sentenced Tamez to six months in jail,
three years probation and a $25,000 fine. Cortez was sentenced to three
months in jail, followed by a period of six months of home confinement,
two-years probation and a $25,000 fine. Jimenez died in 2006, while
Cortez and Tamez were sentenced in late 2006 and directed to serve their
sentences last year. The unnamed companies were never charged. The dust
storm never quite settled after those convictions. Court records show
that a series of continuances delayed when the sentences would begin.
Tamez did not serve his sentence until last year. Jimenez was convicted
but died before sentencing. In reference to the Jimenez and Tamez cases,
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jim McAlister told the court in the fall of
2005: "Both defendants are actively cooperating in helping the
government identify and prosecute other individuals involved in unlawful
activity. The investigation is ongoing and both defendants are expected
to continue their efforts in assisting the government. The government
and the defendants agree that sentencing Mr. Tamez and Mr. Jimenez at
this time could result in a miscarriage of justice." McAlister's motions
to continue Cortez's case are sealed. However, federal court records
show that Cortez gave money to yet a third elected official, so that he
would favor corporate interests involved in the design, construction,
financing, maintenance and management of the Willacy correctional center
that was to house federal inmates. During Cortez's sentencing in 2006,
his lawyer, Mike DeGeurin Sr., of Houston, told Hanen: "I think, to
convince people that he (Cortez) is still a person you can count on to
get things done, he (Cortez) makes some payments to Mr. (Israel) Tamez
and a couple of others - two other commissioners that, we'll leave their
names unspoken." However, Jimenez was the only other person charged,
aside from Cortez. There were believed to be additional conspirators,
known and unknown, the federal record shows. Neither the third
commissioner to which DeGuerin referred, nor the other conspirators that
McAlister referred to in 2005, was never mentioned by name or location
in court documents and was not part of the court record. DeGeurin did
not respond to a recent request for comment. Tamez's attorney, John
David Franz, of McAllen, also could not be reached for comment.
Jimenez's lawyer, Nemecio E. Lopez Jr. of Harlingen, declined to talk
about the case. Enter Guerra and his investigation into the management
and operation of for-profit prisons in Willacy County, which led to the
recent indictments of, among others, U.S. Vice President Richard B.
Cheney, former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and state Sen.
Eddie Lucio Jr., D-Brownsville. The indictment charges Cheney and
Gonzales with profiteering from the jails and neglect of conditions due
to self-interest. The indictment against Lucio charged him with
influence peddling in receiving consulting fees from the firms for
services he would not have been requested to provide were it not for his
official position. Guerra now says the FBI and Texas Rangers told him in
2006 that "higher-ups" in both agencies directed their agents to halt
the federal inquiry into the original money-for-votes and bribery
scheme. Spokeswomen for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern
District of Texas declined to comment on Guerra's allegations, and Tela
Mange of the Texas Department of Public Safety said no one in the
department knew anything about Guerra's allegations, including the Texas
Rangers. The FBI did not return a request for comment. Guerra says that
he reopened the investigation because he wants to ensure justice is done
before he leaves office at the end of this month. "If I know that a
crime has been committed, I have to make a diligent effort to make sure
that the crime is addressed in my tenure. My job is to make sure that
criminals don't get away. That is what a prosecutor does," he said.
James M. Parkey, president and founder of CorPlan, on Monday verified
for the Brownsville Herald that Cortez had been one of the firm's
consultants, but said he had not known of any payments from Cortez to
Tamez, Jimenez or others. "Our position is that Mr. Cortez pleaded
guilty," said CorPlan's lawyer, Edmundo O. Ramirez, of McAllen. There is
no other position, he said. Public records - yearly financial statements
that the Texas Ethics Commission requires of elected officials - show
that Lucio was one of CorPlan's consultants. The Nov. 17 indictment
against Lucio alleges that because of his position he received
consulting fees from six firms, including CorPlan Corrections, Aguirre
Inc., Management & Training Corp. , and Hale-Mills Construction. Guerra
said the firms were tied to the Willacy County 500-bed jail project,
which county commissioners approved in 2000. Parkey said he was not at
liberty to disclose the services Lucio provided his firm without Lucio's
consent. Lucio told The Brownsville Herald in 2002 that he received
consulting fees from the firms for introducing them to public officials
and setting up meetings. In 2002, Parkey said, "Public relations doesn't
require a product in terms of written material. He (Lucio) keeps our
name in front of people." Texas Ethics Commission records show that
Lucio listed receiving at least $135,000 or more from CorPlan
Corrections, Aguirre Inc. and Management & Training Corp. in 2003 and
2004. Hale-Mills is not on the list. Lucio also told The Brownsville
Herald in 2002 and again in 2005 that he had been consulting for CorPlan
since 1999 and that Aguirre and Management & Training Corp. soon
contracted with him for consulting, marketing and public relations. He
would not say at that time when or how much money each company paid him.
It was not until 2004 that Lucio reported the companies in his personal
financial statements to the Texas Ethics Commission, which requires that
officials list retainers and sources of income. Lucio's chief of staff,
Paul Cowen (uncle of Lucio's lawyer, Michael R. Cowen) said in 2002 that
the fees had been reported, but under the umbrella of Rio Shelters Inc.,
a firm owned by Lucio that provides advertisements on bus shelters.
Hale-Mills and Aguirre Inc. did not return a request for comment
Tuesday, and Carl Stuart, communications director for Management &
Training Corp., said, "We just don't make comment on pending
litigation." During the inquiries in 2005, Lucio wrote to CorPlan
Corrections, Aguirre Inc. and Management & Training Corp. advising them
he was taking a leave of absence because news reports had named the
three companies as those involved in the building and management of the
facilities in Willacy County. Lucio at that time brought copies of his
letters to the Brownsville Herald. Cowen, Lucio's lawyer, on Monday said
he has instructed his client not to comment "as long as Mr. Guerra is in
office." Contrary to his client's Nov. 17 indictment, which presiding
District Judge J. Manuel Bañales dismissed Dec. 1, Lucio did not do
consulting work for Hale-Mills, Cowen stressed. (Bañales also threw out
the indictments against Cheney and Gonzales on Dec. 1.) "In fact, we ask
the public to take all of Mr. Guerra's accusations with a grain of salt,
and to consider the misrepresentations he has already been caught making
under oath in this case," Cowen said in a written statement to The
Brownsville Herald. Cowen said he and the senator are disappointed that
Guerra continues his vendetta against Lucio, even after the court
dismissed all charges against the senator. Lucio has to do outside work
to earn a living, Cowen said, noting that the senator is paid only $600
a month by the for his legislative services. Cowen said Lucio earns less
than the minimum wage, and cannot support his family on $7,200 a year.
"However, he has been very careful to ensure that any work he does is
not only legal, but also wholly ethical," Cowen said in a written
statement. Lucio has gone to great lengths to ensure that the consulting
work complies with all legal and ethical requirements, Cowen said,
noting that he requested a formal attorney general's opinion on whether
a legislator can provide consulting, marketing and public relation
services to clients who have dealings with government officials. Cowen
said Lucio also consulted with two attorney generals, the Texas Ethics
Commission and hired a private attorney to ensure that his business
affairs followed the law. In a July 2003 opinion, Texas Attorney General
Greg Abbott told Lucio that laws do not categorically prohibit a
legislator from representing a client's interests before government
officials or entities. Still, Abbott said, legality depends on the
specific facts of a case. Abbott wrote that Lucio did not elaborate on
the nature of his clients' businesses nor on his dealings and
communications on their behalf. Furthermore, whether a public servant's
outside employment creates a conflict of interest frequently requires
resolving fact questions, which is beyond the purview of the opinion
process, Abbott's opinion states. Abbott wrote that a legislator should
be aware of the provisions in Chapter 36 of the Texas Penal Code. A
legislator may not solicit or accept any benefit unless it falls within
one of the exceptions recognized by the code, the opinion states. Abbott
noted that the primary exception allows a legislator to accept fair
compensation for work performed in a capacity other than as a public
servant. "Should you have a specific concern, you may wish to consult
with private counsel," Abbott advised Lucio. Lucio told The Brownsville
Herald in 2002 that he did not consult with an attorney. Cowen on Monday
said that Lucio provided legitimate services to the firms that
contracted him. "Senator Lucio has nothing to hide, and is happy to have
a competent, unbiased prosecutor review all of the evidence in this
matter. Unfortunately, Mr. Guerra's words and actions show him to be
neither unbiased nor competent," Cowen said. Guerra vehemently denies
that his charges against Lucio are part of a vendetta against the
senator. "The problem with Eddie Lucio is that he has not explained what
he does for these companies," Guerra said. During a recent court
hearing, Guerra said that if a jury found companies hired Lucio because
he is a senator and not because of services he provided "then that's
kickbacks and that's it." On Thursday Guerra said, "He (Lucio) says that
he has permission from the attorney general, but the attorney general
opinion did not give him permission (to receive fees from the firms).
And then he said he got permission from the Texas Ethics Commission, and
he has not produced one document showing that. The accusation that I
have a vendetta is a smokescreen." Bañales on Dec. 1 dismissed all
charges against the high-profile defendants. And Wednesday, he removed
Guerra from bringing any further charges in the cases against Lucio and
others in which he has a "clear bias and prejudice." However, even
though Guerra appears hamstrung in his proclaimed quest for justice, the
saga may be nowhere near an end. DA Pro Tem Alfredo Padilla, whom
Bañales appointed to review the indictments, said Thursday that he wants
to present all of the evidence that Guerra gathered to a new grand jury,
which will be impaneled early next year.
December 8, 2008 Valley Morning Star
District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra said Monday that state Sen. Eddie
Lucio's elected position conflicts with his job as a consultant for
companies that work within his jurisdiction. Guerra said he believes
that companies hire Lucio because of his position as a state senator and
that Lucio uses his influence to obtain the consulting work. "These
people are hiring him because of his position and not because of his
skills," Guerra said in an interview. "There's no way to justify it."
Lucio could not be reached for comment Monday afternoon. Guerra said
that Lucio could work as a consultant but not within his state Senate
District 27, that includes Cameron, Kenedy, Kleberg, Willacy and part of
Hidalgo counties. Lucio was first elected in 1991. But Edmundo Ramirez,
a McAllen attorney who represents Ronald Holmes, an attorney for CorPlan
Corrections in Dallas, one of the companies for which Lucio is a
consultant, noted the Texas Ethics Commission has sanctioned Lucio's
work as a consultant. "The ethics commission has found nothing wrong
with those payments," said Ramirez said, referring the consulting fees
Lucio is paid. Lucio owns an advertising and public relations firm in
Brownsville. "Sen. Lucio gets hired because of what he brings to the
table," Ramirez said. "He's a PR man. He's a good one. He brings value
to the table. "Regardless of what Mr. Guerra believes, (payments) are
legal and have been properly reported by Sen. Lucio. The law is the
law." The Texas Attorney General's Office sanctioned Lucio's work as a
consultant in a legal opinion issued in July 2003. Texas law states that
"it must be the services rendered and not the status of the public
servant rendering the services that is of value to the person for whom
the services are performed," the Attorney General's opinion noted.
CorPlan, a prison consulting company, requested on Monday that a judge
quash Guerra's subpoena that orders the company to appear in court
Wednesday. Guerra said he wants CorPlan to appear in court to disclose
the nature of the services it pays Lucio to perform. Last month, Guerra
pushed for grand jury indictments against Lucio, Vice President Dick
Cheney, former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and several local
elected officials. State District Judge Manuel Bañales threw out those
indictments. But Michael Cowen, Lucio's attorney, believes Guerra will
try to re-indict Lucio before Guerra's fourth term expires Dec. 31. The
grand jury is set to meet Friday for its last scheduled session before
its term expires Dec. 31, District Clerk Gilbert Lozano said. Cowen will
request that Bañales on Wednesday disqualify Guerra as prosecutor,
arguing Guerra's "personal animosity toward Lucio creates a conflict of
interest." Guerra filed subpoenas on Dec. 5 to order CorPlan, Management
and Training Corp., Aguirre Inc., Hale Mills Corp., TEDSI Infrastructure
Group Inc. and Dannenbaum Engineering Corp. to appear in court. Lucio
has worked as a consultant for these companies. CorPlan, Management and
Training Corp., Aguirre and Hale Mills are companies that worked on a
$14.5 million prison project that was the focus of a bribery scandal
that led to the convictions of former Willacy County commissioners
Israel Tamez and Jose Jimenez and former Webb County Commissioner David
Cortez.
December 6, 2008 Brownsville Herald
The dismissal last week of indictments against a host of elected
officials, including state Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr., in a Raymondville
courtroom did not signal the end of attorney Michael R. Cowen's trips to
this city of about 10,000 people. If Willacy County District Attorney
Juan Angel Guerra sees himself as the biblical "David," as he has
described himself, Lucio's attorney, Cowen, would be his "Goliath" this
week. Both will square off Wednesday during a hearing before District
Judge J. Manuel Bañales. Pundits predict that there will be plenty of
slings. Guerra said he aims to show at the hearing that consulting fees
Lucio received from six firms were illegal and not earned. Most of the
firms did work associated with private prisons in Willacy County.
Instead, Guerra maintains that the only reason the firms paid Lucio is
because he has the word "senator" before his name. Cowen has said
previously that Guerra is "vindictive" and his animosity against the
senator rises to a conflict, rendering the DA incapable of pursuing any
charges leveled at the senator. Guerra issued subpoenas Friday against
the firms that purportedly paid Lucio, D-Brownsville, consulting fees,
including the firms Management and Training Corp., CorPlan Corrections,
Aguirre Inc., Hale Mills Corp., TEDSI Infrastructure Group, Inc. and
Dannenbaum Engineering Corp. They were directed to attend the Wednesday
hearing and provide documentation, including contracts with Lucio for
his services. Public records from the Texas Ethics Commission show that
Lucio received at least $300,000 from five of the firms from 2003
through 2007. It could not be confirmed if Lucio received money from
Hale Mills Corp. as the grand jury indictment maintains. Lucio suspended
his services to CorPlan Corrections, Management and Training Corp. and
Aguirre Inc. in January 2005 amid the bribery convictions of two Willacy
County commissioners and subsequently a Webb County commissioner,
according to documents that Lucio provided to The Brownsville Herald.
The commissioners were convicted in a bribery and money-for-votes scheme
relating to construction and management of the Willacy Adult
Correctional Center. The companies were not charged. Cowen did not
respond to a request for comment for this story. A grand jury indicted
Lucio Nov. 17 for accepting fees from the firms from January 2005
through September 2008, alleging that they paid him only because he is a
senator. The indictment charged that Lucio ". . . has, with this action,
made a personal profit as a result of his holding said office as a Texas
senator for District 27." Bañales dismissed the indictment Dec. 1,
agreeing with Cowen's contentions, including that the six-count
indictment did not that Lucio had willingly, knowingly, or recklessly
engaged in the alleged conduct. Guerra's goal is also to show that the
Nov. 17 grand jury did not indict Lucio because of Guerra's
vindictiveness or anger toward Lucio, but because there is evidence to
support the jury's indictment that Lucio profited from his elective
office contrary to law. Whether or not Bañales in the 10 a.m. hearing
allows Guerra to present evidence against Lucio or if representatives of
the firms even show up is up in the air.
September 19, 2008 Valley Morning Star
Willacy County residents make up more than half of employees at a
county-owned prison and a detention center that holds illegal
immigrants, said the company that runs the operations. Criminal
background checks screen out about 2 percent of people who apply for
jobs at the 525-bed prison and the 3,000-bed detention center, said Carl
Stuart, a spokesman for Management and Training Corp. in Centerville,
Utah. But three years after the detention center opened, the local job
pool is "tapped out," Stuart said in an e-mail. Now the company recruits
more employees from outside the county, he said. County residents make
up about 73 percent of employees at the detention center that the
company operates for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Stuart
said. The country's largest illegal immigrant detention center employs
about 700 workers, said Jackie Roberson, Raymondville's economic
development manager. The detention center pays starting wages of about
$9.36 an hour, Stuart said. Locals make up about 53 percent of employees
at the county-owned prison that holds prisoners for the U.S. Marshals
Service, Stuart said. The prison pays starting salaries of about $17 per
hour. The prison employs about 200 workers, Roberson said.
February 7, 2008 Valley Morning Star
Willacy County Sheriff Larry Spence on Tuesday denied accusations
that he failed to comply with bookkeeping laws. Spence said he did not
break any laws and has not done anything illegal. He said no one in the
county government has ever told him to operate the Sheriff’s Department
differently than the way he’s been running it for years. County
Treasurer Ruben Cavazos said Spence failed to keep receipts, failed to
charge federal officials for services and improperly deposited money.
The accusations come as Spence faces longtime Chief Deputy David
Martinez and Constable Ben Vera in the March 4 race for the office he’s
held since 1985. “We’re not trying to hide anything here,” Spence said.
“We have open books. There’s no intent to defraud here.” Cavazos accused
Spence of failing to deposit certificates of deposit into a county bank
account. Instead, Spence uses a Sheriff’s Department account to which
Cavazos does not have access, Cavazos said. “If he had CDs in the bank,
the bank will not tell me because he’s not using the county’s
(account),” Cavazos said. Spence said the Sheriff’s Department has used
its account for years but added the department had no certificates of
deposit in the account. “Nobody has brought that to our attention until
this came up,” Spence said of the accusation. “If there was something
that needs to be adjusted, someone should tell us.” Cavazos also accused
Spence of failing to charge Management Training Corp., the company that
runs a federal immigrant detention center, to conduct background checks
on job applicants. “They have a lot of employees (so) that would be a
lot of money for the county,” Cavazos said. In response, Spence said MTC
told him that county commissioners said he couldn’t charge for
background checks. Company spokesman Carl Stuart did not respond to a
message requesting comment. County Commissioner Aurelio Guerra said he
was “not aware of the situation or if any fees should be charged.”
January 24, 2008 Valley Morning Star
The Willacy County jail is close to breaking even more than a year
after local officials feared investors would foreclose on it,
Commissioner Eddie Chapa said this week. The jail must lure higher
numbers of federal prisoners to make a monthly average of $58,000, Chapa
said. So far, average inmate counts have generated between $40,000 and
$45,000 a month, Chapa said. “The latest results show it’s almost paying
for itself — not quite, but almost,” Chapa said. “That’s good news for
us.” An influx of federal prisoners helped the 96-bed jail boost last
year’s average inmate counts to about 80, Sheriff Larry Spence said. “We
worked hard to try to make ends meet,” Spence said. Last year, officials
also hiked the fee it charges the federal government to house prisoners
from $30 a day to $45 a day at the jail that opened in 2004, Spence
said. Four months after county commissioners set aside $25,000 for a
jail administrator, the county still hasn’t hired the official who would
handle billing while contacting the U.S. Marshals Service and Kleberg
County to bring inmates to the jail. Now, the county might not need to
hire the administrator, Chapa said. If the job was (created) to help the
jail make its goal, why would we want to spend the extra money?” Chapa
said. In October 2004, the county opened the jail that replaced an old
jail that was plagued with a long string of escapes before it fell below
state standards. Under the county’s plan, the new jail would hold
federal inmates, for whom the Marshals Service would pay the county $30
a head per day. But federal inmates trickled in. Then in April 2006, the
Marshals Service pulled female inmates out of the jail after a guard was
arrested for having sex with a female prisoner. Two weeks later, county
commissioners put up $137,000 to help the jail make its first payment to
investors. For some county officials, the jail stood at the brink of
foreclosure. “We got to a time when people were looking at other
options,” Spence said. In November 2006, investors postponed a $433,000
payment after the jail ran short of money. “It was a struggle,” Spence
said. “It had a rough start getting going,” In January 2007, the county
entered into a contract with the Marshals Service that boosted the daily
rent to $45 per prisoner.
August 28, 2007 Valley Morning Star
Willacy County Commissioner Aurelio Guerra on Monday questioned a
contract that could pay more than $27 million to the company that runs
an illegal immigrant detention center here. Wednesday, members of the
Willacy County Local Government Corp., the non-profit organization that
oversees the 2,000-bed detention center, will travel to Dallas to close
a deal that’s expected to hire Management Training Corp. to run a
1,000-bed expansion. The $111.5 million contract with the U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement would pay Utah-based MTC a “fixed
annual fee” of $27.4 million when the detention center’s average monthly
inmate count falls below 2,500, the contract states. The government
would pay MTC $27.4 million plus $4.42 a head for each illegal immigrant
when the detention center’s average monthly inmate count exceeds the
2,500 mark, the contract states. “It can be one inmate and we’re
obligated to pay $27 million,” Guerra said. “In past agreements, there
weren’t fixed fees.” Under a current agreement, a federal contract pays
MTC $27.75 a head for each illegal immigrant held in the 2,000-bed
detention center that averages about 1,500 detainees a month. But the
contract does not bind the county to pay MTC $27.4 million a year, said
Michael Harling of Municipal Capital Markets Group in Dallas. The
contract would not tap into the revenue that the county needs to repay
its debt, Harling said. First, the government’s money will go to pay the
county’s debt, Harling said. Then it will go to pay the county, he said.
“To the extent there is enough money, they will pay MTC,” Harding said.
August 2, 2007 KGBT TV4
Allegations of spoiled food and air conditioning problems, and no, we're
not talking about Food 4 Thought. This story involving some detainees
and security guards at the Willacy County detention center who are
speaking out about life for two-thousand immigrants. We have obtained
internal documentation from the Willacy detention center where not only
detainees complain about the conditions inside, but also security guards
have recorded in their logbooks dozens of undocumented immigrants that
have found maggots in their food. The federal detention center located
in Raymondville which houses two-thousand undocumented immigrants has
received criticism for allegedly feeding detainees contaminated or
rotten food. An action 4 News investigation reveals that in one
instance, over 30 detainees reported that the quantity and quality of
food are deplorable, an allegation confirmed by at least two security
guards. One of those anonymous guards says: "the reason it gets
contaminated it's because of the storage facility, they don't have the
storage facility. They were trying to blame the companies that
supposedly the food is coming in spoiled which is not true." Detainees
say they don't have toiletries to keep their most basic sanitary needs,
that they have problems communicating with the outside world,
nevertheless finding an attorney or any kind of legal assistance.
Anthony Matulewicz is an immigration attorney in south Texas and tells
action 4 news he's seen what those immigrants go through. "things in
Willacy was so bad that I actually saw first hand people eating with
their hands" Sais Matulewicz. Security guards have also recorded that 50
detainees complained because they found maggots in their food, and
refused to eat. The situation was so bad for an immigrant that he
attempted to commit suicide. "He was being moved from one dorm to
another because we were having a lot of problems with him. The detainee
was depressed, he was hungry and he was not getting enough" said a
Willacy detention center security guard. "so he was stealing from the
other detainees on the commissary, you know Fritos, candy, whatever they
get with their own money". Another detainee reported he lost $99-dollars
when he was transferred from del Rio to Laredo,, he says his wife is
eagerly awaiting to hear from his my new not so fondly found 'prison'
life". Security guards say they can not believe what they see, they make
reports and advice superiors but the situation is the same. Detainees
are desperate and things may get out of hand. "My concern is that one of
these officers one of these days is going to get hurt or one of these
officers is going to hurt a detainee" emphasized the security guard.
Inside the windowless, dome-shaped tents, they have bunk beds and
communal showers. But immigration and customs enforcement officials tell
Action 4 News, "we try to maintain the dignity and respect within each
person, so the only way we can do that is have a set guideline to
follow". But according to security guards two ladies fainted because of
air conditioning problems last week, a problem frequently experience
during the summer and winter time. Allegations range from giving rotten
food to detainees, problems with air conditioning and heating, and
immigrants attempting suicide due to what they call inhumane treatment
Immigration and customs enforcement also tells Action 4 News they will
look into each allegation and get back with us. Immigration officials
insist those held at the facility are "detainees" and not prisoners.
February 25, 2007 AP
The engine of the old, borrowed camper chugs away in the parking lot of
the county jail – three goats, a rooster and a horse alongside. It is
the temporary home and office of Willacy County District Attorney Juan
Angel Guerra. Mr. Guerra, 52, has brought down public officials and
continues investigations. Most recently, he filed – and then dropped –
motions to have the sheriff and two elected officials removed from
office. Now, he says, they're all out to get him. A special prosecutor
raided his office recently and filed public theft charges against Mr.
Guerra. They were dropped Friday. Depending on whom you talk to, Mr.
Guerra is either a lone-wolf champion for South Texas justice or a
chronic malcontent with some shady dealings of his own. "He's just been
fighting with us for so many years," said Paul Cowan, chief of staff for
state Sen. Eddie Lucio. "Anything you want to do, he wants to fight it,
fight it, fight it. We have no problems working with any other
officials. The problem lies with him." In 1991, with just two years'
experience practicing law in a mechanic's garage, county commissioners
appointed Mr. Guerra to fill in after the incumbent district attorney
died. He began investigating the big landowners and business owners for
crimes such as embezzlement and receiving double federal payments for
fictitious crop losses. Now, Mr. Guerra has gone after the contractors
involved in building private jails. County, state and federal lockups,
and now the huge pods of the 2,000-bed immigration detention center,
make a bleak campus on the former farmland. Mr. Guerra's investigation
into a bribery scheme involving federal prison contracts led to guilty
pleas by three former Willacy and Webb county commissioners. Mr. Guerra
now says he wants to know more about Mr. Lucio's consulting contract for
the prison company that built the $60 million federal complex of
tent-like domes. Mr. Lucio said Mr. Guerra was upset about legislation
he passed that left the county with only one state district judge –
Migdalia Lopez, one of the officials Mr. Guerra wanted out of office.
Mr. Lucio would not disclose his consulting fees for the prison deal but
said they were "modest" and legal. He said the prison had been a win for
the county. "We've brought more than a thousand jobs to that county, and
Johnny Guerra has not brought one," he said. Mr. Guerra says another
company was prepared to build the facility for $35 million. "In six
weeks they spent $60 million," he said. "There's no way that thing cost
$60 million." Two weeks ago, Mr. Guerra skipped court to go to Austin
and look for a sympathetic ear. When he came back, a special prosecutor
appointed by Judge Lopez had taken Mr. Guerra's computers and many of
his files. Mr. Guerra now maintains he can't do his work. According to
Judge Lopez's order appointing the special prosecutor, a grand jury
complained that Mr. Guerra was pressuring them for an indictment in a
sexual harassment case. The special prosecutor is Gustavo Garza, Mr.
Guerra's four-time political opponent. Mr. Garza recently charged Mr.
Guerra with three counts of felony theft by a public servant and one
misdemeanor obstruction charge for trying to prevent officers from
searching his office, but a judge Friday dropped the charges. Mr. Guerra
has threatened to dismiss hundreds of cases in retaliation, but so far
only four have been dropped. Townspeople don't know what to make of it.
"It's a mess," said Polo Gracida, who came to watch court on Tuesday. "I
don't know whether he's a hero or not. We're definitely due for a
change."
November 22, 2006 Express-News
The last of three county commissioners who pleaded guilty to a
$39,000 bribery scandal involving contracts for a new federal detention
facility in the Rio Grande Valley has been sentenced. Former Webb County
Commissioner David Cortez, 72, of Laredo was sentenced Tuesday in
federal court in Brownsville to three months in prison for funneling the
bribes in 2002 to former Willacy County Commissioners Jose Jimenez of
Sebastian and Israel Tamez, 60, of Raymondville in exchange for
favorable votes in the selection of contracts for the 500-bed federal
detention center here. U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen also ordered
Cortez to a two-year term of supervised release, including six months of
house arrest. He was fined $25,000. Jimenez died before sentencing.
Tamez, 60, was sentenced to six months in prison, three years of
supervised release and a $25,000 fine. All three had faced 20 years in
prison. Sheriff Larry Spence said the case had "drug out for so long."
"I was surprised of the sentencing, but at the same time I am glad that
they are getting finalized," he said. But it's still unclear if the case
is over because authorities haven't made public where the money
originated. Authorities have requested anyone else involved to come
forward like the commissioners did, but no additional arrests have been
made. A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office in Houston declined
to comment. Officials have said the companies hired to either design,
build or manage the facility, which opened in 2003, were the Dallas-area
firms CorPlan Corrections LTD and Aguirre Inc., along with Management
Training Corp. of Centerville, Utah, and Hale-Mills Construction of
Houston. Municipal Capital Markets Group Inc, of Dallas, underwrote the
bonds. "It seems like all the people that have investigated this thing,
if there was somebody else in there that they would have been found,"
said Mike Harling, executive vice president of the investment firm. He
said public records showed Cortez was hired by CorPlan, but he suspected
he could have made the bribe on his own will. No company employees have
been charged. "Just because you hire somebody, and hire in the liberal
sense, doesn't mean that you are responsible," Harling said. "If you
haven't asked them to go out and bribe somebody, if they choose to do
that and choose not to tell you, what can you say?" Cortez resigned from
the Webb commission at the time of his guilty plea in 2005. Webb County
Judge Louis Bruni said the case is a sad example of a bad decision.
November 13, 2006 Killeen Daily Herald
A Willacy County official has a word of caution for the Coryell
County Commissioners' Court as it considers a private prison vendor as a
remedy for its overcrowded jail facility. "Have your sheriff talk to our
sheriff. He will let you know what kind of problems he is having," said
Juan Guerra, who pulls double duty as both county and district attorney
in Willacy County. Guerra said his county has struggled through criminal
investigations that saw two of its county commissioners convicted, and
it is also is in danger of defaulting on a bond payment because it
hasn't received enough federal prisoners to generate the needed revenue
to sustain the facility. Coryell County Commissioners are expected to
open a proposal from Innovative Government Strategies to construct and
operate a jail facility when they meet in regular session at 10 a.m.
Monday in the Coryell County Courthouse. According to the documents
turned in by Innovative Government Strategies, the proposed project team
includes James Parkey, with Corplan Corrections Inc., for developer,
Hale-Mills for construction company, Municipal Capital Markets Group for
financing, Deborah L. Williams for architecture and engineering and
CiviGenics-Texas Inc. for management and operations. Coryell County
Attorney Brandon Belt previously expressed concern about the proposed
operator, saying that CiviGenics had been at the center of controversy
recently. However, it is not just CiviGenics that has a troubled past.
The commissioners' consideration of the group comes just days after a
federal judge sentenced former Willacy County Commissioner Israel Tamez
to six months in jail for his role in a bribery scandal connected to a
$14.5 million prison project to construct a U.S. Marshals Service jail.
On Nov. 9, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen handed down the sentence and
also gave Tamez three years' probation and imposed a $25,000 fine. Tamez
and former Commissioner Jose Jimenez, who died of cancer before being
sentenced, pleaded guilty in January 2005 to taking more than $10,000 in
kickbacks, Guerra said. Former Webb County Commissioner David Cortez
also was involved in the scandal and was convicted in March 2005 of
funneling the bribes to the Willacy County commissioners in exchange for
their votes to hire a consultant in the prison project, Guerra said.
Cortez is scheduled to be sentenced Nov. 20. "My understanding was, as
far as implicating the company, it has not been implicated, but the
commissioners have been convicted," Guerra said. "Our records indicate
that when (Cortez) came before the commissioners when this happened four
years ago, he represented himself as a private consultant for Corplan."
In May 2005, Willacy County, on Guerra's instructions, filed a civil
suit against Corplan and Hale-Mills alleging that the two companies were
parties to the bribery. The suit later was dismissed, Guerra said.
Guerra said he could not say whether a federal investigation was still
pending, and U.S. District Court offices were closed Friday for the
federal holiday. Willacy County Sheriff Larry Spence could not be
reached either. Guerra said the lack of competitive bids when Willacy
was building its third federal facility – against his advice and despite
the criminal implications – was not only suspect, but something that
possibly lost Willacy County millions. "No one is checking to see if you
are getting your money's worth," he said. "Because we don't know if that
facility cost $50 million to construct." In fact, Guerra said according
to information he received from experts, the project, which was for a
facility to house Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees, could
have been done for between $30 and $35 million. "The information that I
got, from experts that reviewed the expenses, says they could not
justify the $50 million. They padded the construction costs by an extra
$20 to $15 million," Guerra said. "What is funny you get commissioners
that are indicted for taking $10,000. I am just wondering who are the
real crooks?"
November 9, 2006 AP
A former Willacy County commissioner was sentenced to six months in
federal prison Thursday for taking bribes in return for votes on a
federal prison contract. Israel Tamez, 60, of Raymondville, also must
pay a $25,000 fine and serve three years probation after his release.
Tamez and former Willacy County Commissioner Jose Jimenez of Sebastian
pleaded guilty in January 2005 to conspiracy to commit bribery. Tamez
admitted receiving cash payments totaling $10,000 for voting to select
particular companies to design, build, maintain and manage the prison.
Charges against Jimenez were dismissed earlier this year after he died.
August 23, 2006 Valley Star
Willacy County officials will have to pay as much as $600,000 to bail
out the new $7.5 million jail that has run short of money to pay
investors who could foreclose, County Judge Simon Salinas said. The
financially strapped county will have to set aside about $600,000 as
officials work on a proposed $3.5 million budget that's unlikely to
include $300,000 to reinstate employee health insurance. "It's a hard
pill to swallow," Salinas said. The decision came after a Friday meeting
in which Salinas and Sheriff Larry Spence agreed to a study that will
help determine whether the county will run the jail or turn over
operations to a management company. Management and Training Corp. (MTC),
the Utah-based company that operates a 525-bed, county-owned prison and
the county's new $60 million immigration detention center, will conduct
the study at no charge, Salinas said. "It's kind of a feasibility study
that looks at different options," Spence said. Friday, officials met
with J.C. Conner, MTC's vice president, and Michael Harling of Municipal
Capital Markets Group of Dallas, which handled the sale of bonds to fund
construction of the county's jail, prison and the immigration detention
center. After the meeting, Salinas said the county will have to budget
about $600,000 to help the jail make its second payment in November.
Like some commissioners, Salinas had said the county couldn't afford to
bail out the jail. When county officials made plans to build the jail,
they counted on housing federal prisoners to pay off project costs.
Under the county's plan, federal prisoners - many of whom would be
female inmates - would take up 48 of the jail's 96 beds. But the
Marshals Service has failed to come through with a steady flow of
prisoners, officials said. Spence has said the county's federal inmate
count has steadily climbed to about 35. After a sex scandal, the
Marshals Service hasn't housed female prisoners in the jail. In April,
the Marshals Service removed 19 female prisoners from the jail amid the
scandal. After an internal investigation, sheriff's officials fired two
female guards after female prisoners accused them of offering favors to
female inmates. A Texas Rangers investigation later led authorities to
arrest a male guard accused of having sex with a female prisoner.
August 1, 2006 Valley Star
Willacy county commissioners won't bail out the new $7.5 million
county jail if it can't afford to pay investors, County Judge Simon
Salinas said Monday. Instead, commissioners may hire a private
management company to operate the jail, Commissioner Aurelio Guerra
said. But Sheriff Larry Spence warned that the county would pay as much
$70 a day to house its prisoners in a privately operated jail. Monday,
the jail held 49 county prisoners, he said. As commissioners work on
their proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year, they won't set aside
$566,000 to make the jail's second payment, Salinas said. "I will not
bail (it) out with local money," Salinas said. "I will not do it again."
In late April, commissioners agreed to pay investors more than $137,000
after the jail ran short of money to make its first payment. The Willacy
County Public Facilities Corp., a non-profit organization that oversees
the jail that opened in October 2004, must make its second payment in
November. Under the county's plan, federal prisoners - many of whom
would be female inmates - would take up 48 of the jail's 96 beds. "We
were told that was the need," Sheriff Larry Spence said of the plan to
house female prisoners. "If we could build a facility to house females,
(the Marshal's Service) would more than likely keep it full." But the
Marshals Service has failed to come through with a steady flow of
prisoners, officials said. Monday, the jail held 35 federal prisoners,
Spence said. Since an April sex scandal, the Marshals Service hasn't
housed female prisoners in the jail. "That definitely caused a problem,"
Spence said. In April, the sex scandal led the Marshals Service to
remove 19 female prisoners from the jail.
July 23, 2006 Express News
The Willacy County attorney is speaking out against his county's new
contract for a massive detention center because he said it involves
companies still under a cloud from the 2004 bribery convictions of three
elected officials. Juan Angel Guerra also accuses veteran Sen. Eddie
Lucio Jr., D-Brownsville, of going back on his word by continuing to
represent the same firms. Former Willacy County Commissioners Israel
Tamez and the late Jose Jimenez were convicted in 2004 of accepting
bribes in exchange for favorable votes regarding a 600-bed prison that
opened in Raymondville, the county seat, in 2003. The third convicted
official, Webb County Commissioner David Cortez, was an associate of
CorPlan Corrections, a consulting company at the time of the prison
project. Cortez was accused of funneling the bribe money for favorable
votes on contracts. No company employees, however, have been charged.
Federal prosecutors wouldn't comment on the case, but observers believe
the investigation is ongoing because the commissioners' sentencing dates
have been pushed back several times. Meanwhile, the same firms are
building a 2,000-bed detention facility near the same prison. Willacy
commissioners voted 3-2 on Monday to approve $60.6 million in bonds for
the new facility, which is on a fast-track construction schedule to
house mostly non-Mexican undocumented immigrants in a series of tentlike
structures for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
Utah-based Management Training Corp., or MTC, will operate the facility;
Houston-based Hale-Mills Construction Inc. is building it; and
Argyle-based CorPlan is consulting on the project, said Guerra, who is
the county and district attorney. A May 27, 2005, letter from
commissioners to the county's nonprofit corporation set up to oversee
the federal prison project asked it to "terminate its contractual
relationship with CorPlan," because a Willacy County lawsuit against the
firm alleged it was involved with the bribes. "Now they are asking me to
sign a contract that includes CorPlan," Guerra said. "I told the
commissioners you can't have it both ways. First you pass the resolution
saying you don't want to deal with CorPlan. Now you do a contract that I
know for a fact includes CorPlan. So we are back to square one." The
lawsuit was dropped in April. County Judge Simon Salinas said he wasn't
aware of the letter and resolution that prompted it. It's probably too
late anyway, he added. "The contract is already signed, the work is
already begun," he said. Regardless, Salinas said, the county can't
proceed under the assumption that leaders of the companies are
criminals. "In this country we are innocent until proven guilty," he
said. "And nobody out there pressed charges against the companies. ...
Just because these (commissioners) plead guilty doesn't mean everybody
in the world is guilty." Guerra favored Tennessee-based Corrections
Corporation of America, or CCA, which offered to finance the detention
facility on its own rather than through the county. He said the
commissioners initially favored CCA, but later picked MTC. Commissioner
Noe Loya said Guerra "is trying to find every excuse to hire CCA, and
change our minds, but it's over." Guerra said he met with Lucio two
weeks ago and the veteran lawmaker pushed MTC. "I asked him, 'Are you
talking to me as my senator or as an employee of one of these
companies?'" Guerra said. "He told me he was talking to me as a
consultant." Lucio said he met with Guerra because it "appeared that he
had quite a bit of influence on the Commissioners Court." Lucio said he
told Guerra he favored MTC because it treats its employees well. Lucio
said he thought CorPlan had been cleared because the lawsuit filed on
behalf of Willacy County against James Parkey, president of CorPlan, was
dropped and there have been no other arrests. Parkey did not return a
call seeking comment. "My main focus on talking with Johnny (Guerra) was
trying to sell him on the fact that MTC was a very reputable company,"
Lucio said. "I feel very comfortably speaking on their behalf and asking
them to consider us and that was my main focus." According to the Texas
Ethics Commission, Lucio reported in 2005 that MTC and CorPlan paid him
a total of at least $50,000 through his Brownsville company, Rio
Shelters Inc. In the wake of the bribery scandal, Lucio said he had
stopped representing the firms and wouldn't again until the matter was
cleared up. "I know there has been a case, a problem, a situation there
where somebody associated with (Parkey) out of Laredo was indicted and
convicted," Lucio said, referring to Cortez. "But when the lawsuit
against him was dropped, I felt that he was exonerated." Told that the
bribery investigation may still be open, he said: "If it is, I am not
aware of it." Asked if he was being paid by MTC or CorPlan for
encouraging the detention center contract, he said: "It's up to them if
they feel I did a good job." Lucio said it was "very hard to draw a fine
line" between his job as a lawmaker and his private work, but added: "I
can tell you this: I do my best." "I get paid $600 a month to be a state
senator, and I do it just about on a full-time basis," he said. Damon
Hiniger, a vice president of CCA in Tennessee, said he was surprised by
the county's decision because CCA was going to invest its own money, pay
about $1.8 million in property taxes, and shoulder the risk. Judge
Salinas said he was influenced by the bottom line, nothing more. "I have
nothing against CCA, they are a good reputable company, but they are in
the business to make their own bucks," he said. The detention facility
is to open Aug. 1 with 500 beds, and then have 1,500 more available Oct.
1. It is part of President Bush's Secure Border Initiative.
May 25, 2005 Valley Star
Willacy County commissioners will request that
the Willacy County Public Facilities Corp. break its contract with a
company that is a defendant in a county lawsuit. But rankled members of
the Public Facilities Corp. (PFC) said they would stand by their vote to
hire Corplan Corrections, a prison consultant in Irving. If PFC members
refuse the request, commissioners could remove them, County Attorney
Juan Angel Guerra said Tuesday, following commissioners’ request on
Monday that the PFC terminate its contract with Corplan Corrections. On
May 12, the PFC voted to hire Corplan to begin work on a 500-bed
addition to a $14.5 million federal prison. The project’s cost had not
been estimated, officials said. On May 13, Willacy County filed a
lawsuit against Corplan and Hale Mills Inc., the contractor in the
prison project. Willacy County formed the PFC as a nonprofit
organization charged with the development of the prison project. In the
lawsuit filed by attorney Ramon Garcia, the Hidalgo County judge,
Willacy County claims illegal action voided the contract that led to the
prison’s construction. The prison project has been the focus of an
ongoing federal bribery investigation that has led to the convictions of
two former Willacy County commissioners and a former Webb County
commissioner.
May 21,
2005 Valley Star
The Willacy County Public Facilities Corp.’s
decision to hire a company that is a defendant in a Willacy County
lawsuit could jeopardize the case, District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra
said Friday. On May 12, the Public Facilities Corp. hired Corplan
Corrections to expand the $14.5 million federal prison, a project that
sparked a bribery scandal that led to the convictions of two former
Willacy County commissioners and a former Webb County commissioner. The
move would lead to the construction of a 500-bed addition to the prison,
which opened with 500 beds in late 2003. The project’s cost had not
been estimated, officials said. A day later, on May 13, Willacy County
filed a lawsuit against Corplan, an Irving consulting firm, and Hale
Mills Inc., a Houston contractor, claiming illegal action voided the
contract that led to the prison’s construction. "It’s premature
to enter into further contracts with those companies, especially with a
pending lawsuit," Guerra said. Willacy County formed the Public
Facilities Corp. as a nonprofit organization charged with development of
the prison project. The Public Facilities Corp. owns the prison.
Attorney Ramon Garcia, the Hidalgo County judge who filed the lawsuit on
behalf of Willacy County, declined to comment on whether the Public
Facilities Corp.’s action jeopardized the lawsuit. "I’ve been
hired to represent parties regarding the facility that’s already been
constructed," said Garcia, who Guerra said was working on a
contingent fee that would pay him 40 percent of any damages awarded.
"These are separate and distinct transactions." In the
lawsuit, Willacy County claims former Webb County Commissioner David
Cortez worked as a consultant to the two companies when he funneled
about $39,000 to "several" Willacy County commissioners. In
turn, former Willacy County Commissioners Israel Tamez and Jose Jimenez
agreed to vote to select the companies for the project, the lawsuit
claims. In March, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen convicted Cortez of
funneling about $39,000 in bribes to "several" Willacy County
commissioners in exchange for their votes to hire a consultant in the
prison project. In January, Hanen convicted Tamez and Jimenez after they
pleaded guilty to taking more than $10,000 in bribes in the project. An
ongoing federal and state investigation is expected to lead to charges
against at least one other Willacy County elected official, authorities
have said.
May 18, 2005 AP
Willacy County has filed a lawsuit against two companies involved in
a $14.5 million federal prison project that became entwined in a bribery
scheme. The civil lawsuit was filed last week in state district court
against Corplan Corrections of Argyle and Hale Mills Inc. of Houston.
The suit claims the companies conspired to bribe county commissioners to
select them for the construction project. Although the lawsuit does not
specify damages, District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra said the
financially troubled county could get title to the prison. "The
contract would be null and void, so technically the prison would end up
belonging to the county free of charge," Guerra said in Thursday
editions of the Valley Morning Star in Harlingen.
March
25, 2005 San Antonio Express-News
A third former South Texas county commissioner
charged in connection with a bribery scandal surrounding a detention
facility in the Rio Grande Valley was convicted Thursday in Brownsville.
Authorities said others could be charged. David Cortez, 70, of Laredo, a
former Webb County commissioner, was charged, pleaded guilty and was
convicted Thursday of conspiring to "obstruct, delay and affect
commerce" for his role in helping secure a contract for the Willacy
County Adult Correctional Center in Raymondville. He waived his right to
have a grand jury investigate. The charge accused him of funneling at
least $39,000 to help a consulting firm get part of the job. Cortez is
cooperating with the FBI in an ongoing investigation, authorities said.
He was released on a personal recognizance bond and is scheduled to be
sentenced June 28. He faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in federal
prison. The name of the consulting company he secured the bids for was
not released. Two former Willacy County commissioners, Jose Jimenez of
Sebastian and Israel Tamez of Raymondville, pleaded guilty Jan. 4 to
accepting bribes of $10,000 or more for their votes awarding contracts
to build the 500-bed detention facility used for federal inmates.
Willacy County Sheriff Larry Spence said the Dallas-area firms CorPlan
Corrections LTD and Aguirre Inc., along with Management & Training
Corp. of Centerville, Utah, and Hale-Mills Construction of Houston, were
the companies hired to either design, build or manage the Raymondville
facility, which opened in 2003. "Most of these guys have worked
together on several projects," Spence said. Asked to confirm that
Cortez had worked for CorPlan, the firm's director, James Parkey, said
by phone, "I have no comment on that. Obviously that's a tickly
subject and I could refer you to my attorney." According to a
charging document, "several Willacy County commissioners did
solicit and receive things of value" from Cortez "in exchange
for providing advantages not available to others interested in and
competing for the selection of a consultant" for the facility.
"It was further part of the conspiracy that several Willacy County
commissioners did agree to tacitly and implicitly to provide (Cortez)
and other corporate representatives with assurances in their
capacity" as commissioners, that Cortez and the company he
represented "would receive favorable consideration" in
exchange for money, the document states. The commissioners agreed to
accept the money in June 2000 and were paid around October 2002,
according to court records.
February
26, 2005 Houston Chronicle
When traditional jobs in agriculture and the
oil patch began to shrink, Willacy County saw salvation in prisons and
jails. A 540-bed jail opened for federal prisoners in 2003 and a 96-bed
county jail is now nearing completion, both located next to an existing
state jail at the main crossroads of this rural county in the deep Rio
Grande Valley. In addition to the jobs provided at the facilities,
county officials envisioned ringing cash registers as inmates' families
made visits, spending money at local hotels, gas stations and
restaurants. But today, the optimism has been overshadowed by scandal. A
pair of county commissioners await sentencing in April after admitting
taking bribes from corporate executives in exchange for voting on jail
contracts. The executives haven't been identified in federal charges.
Compounding all that is a dramatic drop in the number of inmates being
housed in the federal facility. Since November, the U.S. Marshals
Service has removed more than 200 prisoners to jails in neighboring
Cameron County, where jail costs are nearly half what Willacy jailers
are paid under the existing federal contract. Willacy's
2005 budget counted on a projected $300,000 payment from Management
Training Corp. of Centerville, Utah, the private management firm that
operates the jail. Willacy County receives a $2 share of the $70-plus
daily payment received for each federal inmate. Today, there are about
300 inmates in the 540-bed jail, and the private management company
acknowledges it is losing money. Executives with the companies that
built and manage the federal jail strongly deny any involvement with the
bribery scandal. Hale-Mills Construction Inc., a Houston firm that built
both the federal jail and the nearly completed county jail, which cost
$7.5 million in financing and construction, did not return repeated
calls for comment. But the firm issued a statement denying any knowledge
of the bribes. Edmundo Ramirez, a McAllen attorney representing Corplan
Corrections of Argyle, the project manager, said, ''We have no
involvement with that (bribery) at all." District Attorney
Juan Angel Guerra said the first sign of any criminal wrongdoing
surfaced when the county's public facilities corporation — created in
1999 to build the federal jail — received a $45,700 bill for a credit
card account. Authorities soon learned ex-county auditor Armando
Rubalcaba, who was hired after Garcia left in late 1996, had opened the
account without telling other county officials, Guerra said. Rubalcaba
also chaired the jail facilities' board of directors. The bill included
thousands of cash withdrawals the auditor made from a convenience store
he owns, as well as charges for trips to Las Vegas resorts, airline
travel and expensive meals. Rubalcaba, fired for incompetence in October
2003, pleaded no contest to theft charges last year and agreed to tell
investigators all he knew about corruption in the county. He accepted a
plea bargain that allows him to be free on probation for 10 years, and
he must make restitution to the county. After that, the investigation
moved quickly, and on Jan. 4, two commissioners — Jose Jimenez, 67,
and Israel Tamez, 58, — pleaded guilty to accepting more than $10,000
''from particular corporate representatives who were selected for
design, construction, maintenance and management of the jail." So
far, Justice Department officials have refused to say who made the
payoffs.
February
10, 2005 Valley Star
Willacy County officials are
"disappointed" in the U.S. Marshals Service’s placement of
inmates in the federal prison that they built to bolster the county
budget, County Judge Simon Salinas said Wednesday. This week, the inmate
count stood at about 313 in the 500-bed prison, up from an average of
about 260 from October to December, Sheriff Larry Spence said. But
county officials had based their $3.8 million general fund budget on
near-capacity inmate counts projected to generate $300,000. "They’re
hitting us in the pocketbook," Salinas said. As part of an
agreement, Management & Training Corp., the private firm that runs
the prison, pays the county $2 a day for each federal inmate housed in
the county-owned prison. County officials expected the inmate count to
jump after last month’s meeting with U.S. Marshal Ben Reyna. Jan. 4,
Spence and State Sen. Eddie Lucio, D-Brownsville, traveled to Reyna’s
office in Washington, D.C., to discuss the drop in inmates. Lucio
participated as a consultant to Management & Training Corp., the
company that manages the prison. A
year-end money crunch led the Marshals Service to transfer inmates to
jails with lower housing costs, Spence said. In 2000, county
commissioners entered into a contract to build the $14.5 million prison
after the Marshals Service solicited the construction of a South Texas
prison to hold its inmates. The prison opened in October 2003. Last
month, a U.S. district judge convicted former County Commissioners
Israel Tamez and Jose Jimenez after they pleaded guilty to taking more
than $10,000 in kickbacks in the prison project.
February
7, 2005 San Antonio Express-News
State Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr., D-Brownsville, made
the right decision by suspending his business ties, even if only
temporarily, with three contractors connected to a federal detention
facility at the center of a criminal investigation in the Rio Grande
Valley. He should make it permanent. In announcing his decision, the
South Texas legislator said he did not want any misperceptions about his
business dealings. Lucio, president and CEO of Rio Shelters Inc. a
marketing and advertising agency, has been on the payroll of the three
companies involved in that public construction project for several
years. His primary job was to introduce company officials to power
brokers in the Rio Grande Valley. In interviews with the Brownsville
Herald, Lucio said he has worked with CorPlan Corrections of Argyle,
Aguirre Inc. of Dallas and the Management and Training Corp. of
Centerville, Utah, since 1999 earning about $100,000 a year. If that is
so, why didn't his employment with the three companies appear on his
financial disclosure statements filed with the state until 2004? Lucio
is correct when he says it is all about perception for a politician, and
omitting vital information about his employers on his state officeholder
reports raises serious questions.
January
20, 2005 Brownsville Herald
State Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr. on Tuesday
temporarily suspended his consulting work for three companies involved
with constructing and managing a Willacy County federal detention center
— the focus of a federal bribery investigation. Lucio, D-Brownsville,
told The Brownsville Herald on Wednesday that he has taken a “leave of
absence” from representing James Parkey’s CorPlan Corrections of
Argyle, Pedro Aguirre’s Aguirre Corp. of Dallas, and J.C. Conner’s
Management and Training Corp. (MTC) of Georgetown, until the federal
inquiry in Willacy County concludes. Lucio said he would reassess the
relationship with the firms that pay him about $100,000 a year combined.
The federal investigation already has resulted in the Jan. 4 convictions
of Willacy County commissioners Jose Jimenez of Sebastian and Israel
Tamez of Raymondville for accepting at least $10,000 in bribes in
exchange for their votes in awarding contracts for the center’s
construction. U.S. Attorney Michael Shelby has not charged the corporate
representatives who allegedly bribed Jimenez and Tamez. Companies
involved in the project also have not been accused of any wrongdoing.
Lucio said Wednesday that he has been on CorPlan’s payroll since 1999
and that the other two firms soon contracted him. He wouldn’t say when
or how much each specifically has paid him for marketing the firms and
introducing them to public officials. The Herald found, however, that it
was not until 2004 that Lucio reported the companies in his financial
statements. Asked if he believed that the companies would pay him more
than $100,000 a year were he not a senator, Lucio said that “it might
seem like a lot of money, and it is in our area of the state, but there
are senators and representatives that are making much more money on one
case than I do in one year. So, I am not ashamed of what I make. I
worked for that.”
January
13, 2005 Valley Morning Star
State Sen. Eddie Lucio on Wednesday stood
behind his work as a consultant for a company involved in a $14.5
million federal prison project in Willacy County. Last week, Lucio was
working as a consultant for Corplan Corrections and Management &
Training Corp. (MTC) when he went to Washington D.C., to discuss a
recent drop in the federal prison’s inmate count with U.S. Marshals
Service Director Ben Reyna. The prison project has become the subject of
an investigation that led to the conviction of two Willacy County
officials of taking bribes from at least one of the companies involved
in the design and construction of the prison, according to the U.S.
Attorney’s Office. No company has been named as the source of the
bribes. The prison has been struggling to maintain the number of federal
inmates it houses. A decline in the number has hurt Willacy County
financially. The county for months has been struggling to keep from
plunging into debt. MTC requested the meeting with Reyna, Willacy County
Sheriff Larry Spence said, since the Marshals Service sends federal
inmates to the prison. "I think it helped. It kind of opened the
door," said Spence, who traveled to Washington, D.C. with Lucio and
County Commissioner Noe Loya. Lucio’s connection to the prison goes
back for several years. In 1999, Lucio "introduced" Corplan
Corrections to Willacy County commissioners as they began to plan for a
federal prison here, Lucio said of the Argyle consulting firm that
worked to develop the project. Among Lucio’s clients is Aguirre
Construction, the Dallas firm that designed the federal prison. Lucio
also works as a consultant for MTC, the Utah firm that manages the
prison. Last week, U.S. district Judge Andrew Hanen convicted former
Willacy County Commissioners Israel Tamez and Jose Jimenez of taking
more than $10,000 in kickbacks in the federal prison project. Federal
prosecutors charged Tamez and Jimenez received kickbacks "from
particular corporate representatives who were selected in the
competition" for the prison project. The 500-bed prison’s inmate
count dropped from near-capacity in early October to about 240 in
December, Spence said, noting MTC pays the county $2 for every prisoner.
The financially embattled county projected $300,000 in federal prison
money to boost its $3.8 million general fund budget. A year-end money
crunch led the Marshal’s Service to transfer inmates to prisons with
lower housing costs, Spence said.
January 13,
2005 Brownsville Herald
Three companies with ties to state Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr., D-Brownsville,
worked on the construction of the federal detention center in Willacy
County, which is now the subject of an federal investigation into
bribes. Inquiries already netted the Jan. 4 convictions of Willacy
County commissioners Jose Jimenez, 67, of Sebastian, and Israel Tamez,
58, of Raymondville. They each pleaded guilty to accepting $10,000 or
more in bribes from corporate representatives involved in the design,
construction, financing, maintenance and management of the detention
center, according to U.S. Attorney Michael Shelby. According to public
records, the primary companies involved in the project include jail
consultant Corplan Corrections of Argyle, design-builder Hale-Mills
Construction of Houston, Aguirre Corp. of Dallas, and the Management and
Training Corp. (MTC) of Utah, which manages the detention center.
Federal Election Commission records also identify Corplan’s James M.
Parkey as an architect with Aguirre Corp. Lucio has been on Corplan’s,
Aguirre’s and MTC’s payroll for about four years for marketing,
public relations and consulting work. He remains on the payrolls of at
least Corplan and MTC, The Brownsville Herald found Wednesday. Asked
if he was involved in wrongdoing, Lucio answered without hesitation. “Of
course not,” he said. “You don’t even have to ask that.” In
a prepared statement, Shelby said the two commissioners admitted to
accepting a series of bribes from June 2000 through March 2003 in
exchange for their votes awarding contracts for the construction of the
detention center. In June 2000, The Brownsville Herald reported that
Lucio authored legislation in 1999 clarifying that counties can enter
into a contract with a private vendor for the design, management or
construction of jails. Lucio was a consultant for MTC in 2000, which had
been vying for the Cameron County detention center project. Lucio told
The Brownsville Herald in 2002 and 2004 that Corplan, Aguirre, MTC and
other firms contracted him for marketing, public relations and
consulting work. He said this included introducing and setting up
meetings with local governmental officials. Lucio’s 2003 financial
statement filed in 2004 with the Texas Ethics Commission reflects that
Aguirre paid him $10,000 to $24,999; TEDSI $25,000 or more; Corplan
$25,000 or more; and MTC $25,000 or more. Lucio
declined to tell The Brownsville Herald on Wednesday the specific amount
of money Corplan and MTC paid him. He confirmed that he continues on
their payroll, however.
January 8,
2005 Valley Morning Star
Willacy County commissioners
will consider hiring attorney Ramon Garcia, Hidalgo County’s judge, to
investigate whether there are grounds to sue companies involved in a
federal prison project that paid kickbacks to two former
commissioners.
Friday, an attorney representing a company involved in the prison
project vehemently denied Corplan Corrections was involved in any
wrongdoing. Monday, commissioners will consider hiring Garcia to
investigate whether there are grounds to file a civil lawsuit against
companies involved in the $14.5 million federal prison and the current
development of a $7.5 million county jail. "We’re not going to
tolerate companies coming in to take advantage of small counties and
offering kickbacks and going on like it’s business as usual,"
District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra said. "Whoever offers kickbacks
is just as guilty as those taking kickbacks."
Tuesday, U.S. district Judge Andrew Hanen convicted former
commissioners Israel Tamez and Jose Jimenez of taking more than $10,000
in kickbacks in the federal prison project. Under the law, contracts
that involve illegal activity are void, Guerra said. "Someone gave
them that money," County Judge Simon Salinas said. "Whoever
made these guys get dirty, they’re going to go down, too. I want them
to pay for it. Someone’s going to take them on in the courtroom."
The county could win "millions" of dollars in damages because
a financial firm involved in the project has sold about $25 million in
bonds — about $10 million more than the prison’s $14.5 million cost,
Guerra said. But
that bond money was used to pay interest, said Edmundo Ramirez, a
McAllen attorney representing Corplan Corrections, a consultant in the
federal prison project.
Willacy County Federal
Detention Center, Raymondville, Texas
November 17, 2009 Texas Tribune
The detained immigrant told officials at the South Texas Detention Complex
he’d been sexually assaulted and tortured in his home country and asked for
medical care. Six weeks later, when he still hadn’t seen a doctor, the facility
medical director offered this explanation: The complex didn’t have a local
urologist on contract. That wasn’t the only health care shortfall Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigators cited in a 2008 report, one that
didn’t name the detainee or his ethnicity. Sixteen of the facility’s 40
“critical” health care positions were vacant, leaving one staff doctor and two
dozen nurses to care for nearly 1,400 detainees. The complex had no psychiatrist
and no dentist, and was short 11 nurses. As a result, investigators said,
chronic care management was “haphazard at best.” Monitoring of prescription
drugs was lax. And not all intake screenings were performed on time. “Poor
medical care was the most problematic issue facing the facility,” investigators
wrote. ICE officials say the agency “is committed to providing all detainees in
our care with timely, safe, humane and appropriate treatment.” “Significant
reforms are being made to the immigration detention system and health care
management,” said agency spokesman Carl Rusnok. But many federal authorities say
they’re battling the same staffing shortages facing hospitals, nursing homes and
prison systems nationwide. Though they are aggressively recruiting, they’re
competing for candidates with the higher-paying private sector. Immigrant rights
groups say the remote locations of many Texas detention centers only contribute
to high employee turnover and vacancy rates. That leads to overmedication,
poorly kept medical records, and “sporadic and inconsistent care,” said Ann
Baddour, a policy analyst with Texas Appleseed, a non-profit that uses volunteer
lawyers to help solve social problems. Some get no care at all, she said. A 2007
review of medical care at the Willacy Detention Center in Raymondville found
medical staffing was “barely adequate,” and that the facility’s clinic was too
small to care for its 1,800 detainees. Twenty of the facility’s 46 health care
positions were vacant. The detention center had no clinical director, dentist,
pharmacist or psychiatrist. Half of Willacy’s licensed vocational nurses hadn’t
even completed new employee orientation. In facility inspections in 2007 and
2008, investigators cited medical staffing shortages at the Port Isabel Service
Processing Center, the El Paso Processing Center and the Laredo Contract
Detention Facility. In El Paso, five of the facility’s 34 health care positions
were vacant – including the staff psychiatrist. At the Port Isabel facility,
inspectors found a third of detainees’ medical requests weren’t handled in a
“timely” manner. And in Laredo, inspectors found detainees with doctor-ordered
dietary requirements weren’t getting the right food, and that patients had
little privacy in the facility clinic. Kathleen Baldoni, a former nurse at the
Willacy Detention Center, said these problems are common across Texas'
facilities. She said inmates suffering from health problems are "lucky to be
seen within a week,” and that many illnesses occur because detainees don’t get
enough water or nutritional food. Medical staff never even get around to simple
quality of life fixes, she said, like cleaning out detainees’ hearing aids or
replacing broken eye glasses. “We didn’t delve into anything that wasn’t
absolutely necessary,” said Baldoni, who has testified before Congress on health
care in immigration detention. “After a while, you stop thinking about the
people. You force yourself not to care as much. Because how else do you get the
job done?”
October 7, 2009 San Antonio Express-News
In a move that could affect the revenues of private prison firms and county
jails, the Obama administration said Tuesday it will review, renegotiate and
possibly terminate some of its more than 300 contracts for detaining
unauthorized immigrants. The announcement by Department of Homeland Security
Secretary Janet Napolitano is part of an overhaul aimed at ending the reliance
on penal institutions for detainees with noncriminal immigration violations or
valid asylum claims. The overhaul, first announced in August, followed scathing
reports and lawsuits by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups
alleging inhumane conditions, denial of medical care, and isolation in remote
areas with limited access to pro-bono legal aid. Napolitano, in a news
conference with Immigration and Customs Enforcement Assistant Secretary John
Morton, said she inherited a scattered “nonsystem” of government and privately
run facilities that needed to be monitored. “It's a huge range of detainees,”
she said, “from those who have criminal records who need to be in a very
prisonlike setting to those who have no record at all and indeed have come
seeking asylum.” The system has ballooned from 5,000 beds in 1994 to more than
32,000 beds in 2008, used by about 380,000 detainees that year. Napolitano said
the capacity to detain people would remain, but the standards of “health and
safety, law, and indeed human decency” needed to be enforced. Plans include
centralizing operations, doubling the personnel involved in detention center
oversight, building new facilities in urban locations near immigration service
providers, and housing detainees in converted hotels, nursing homes, or other
residential facilities. Detainees would be classified by risk, with nonviolent,
noncriminal populations such as recently arrived asylum seekers sent to less
prisonlike environments. Detainees with criminal convictions would remain in
jails. There are also plans for an online system to locate detainees, something
family members and even attorneys are not always able to do. The practice of
detaining families at the T. Don Hutto Family Residence Center in Taylor, which
drew criticism because of its cells and barbed wire, has already ended. The
facility is now being used to house female detainees. It was unclear what effect
the changes will have on private firms or communities that draw revenue from
jailing detainees, but Willacy County Sheriff Larry Spence said the reduced
population at the Willacy Detention Center in Raymondville — at 3,000 beds the
nation's largest — has been apparent and may cause problems for a county that
counts on jobs, taxes, and revenue from it. “I know the numbers are down from
what they used to be,” he said. “It means the county hasn't had the same amount
of money coming in.” The county subcontracts with Utah-based Management &
Training Corp., a private prison management firm. Kathleen Walker, past
president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said she expected
quite a few disappointed contractors. “I would imagine that in the state of
Texas, where we have so many different county facilities and independent
facilities run by contractors, that they are not going to like seeing a
potential dip in revenues to retirement centers or abandoned hotels,” she said.
“But to put people in on civil violations with people that have felony exposure
is really just not acceptable.”
June 28, 2009 Brownsville Herald
It took about five years, but state Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr. seems to have
phased out his paid consulting jobs for construction and engineering firms. Last
year, however, he still received at least $25,000 in consulting fees from the
Houston-based TEDSI Infrastructure Group, according to his personal financial
statement on file with the Texas Ethics Commission. "I was fulfilling a prior
obligation on a contract that I had with TEDSI which expired in 2008," Lucio
wrote in a statement to The Brownsville Herald Wednesday. Lucio, D-Brownsville,
did not say what he did for the firm, but in 2002 said that he would set up
meetings and introduce the firm to officials in Brownsville. In 2004 amid
mounting criticism of possible conflicts of interest, Lucio told the Herald that
he would phase out consulting for firms that do business in the Rio Grande
Valley and the state. Besides consulting for TEDSI, Lucio also was retained by
CorPlan Corrections of Dallas, Management & Training Corp. of Utah, Aguirre Inc.
of Dallas, and Dannenbaum Engineering Corp. of Houston. At the start of 2005,
Lucio severed ties with CorPlan, Aguirre, and MTC amid federal inquiries into
the federal detention center in Willacy County. A Webb County commissioner and
two former Willacy County commissioners were convicted of bribery. Companies
involved in the project were not accused of any wrongdoing. Lucio also stopped
consulting for Dannenbaum, which he said he introduced to the Brownsville
Navigation District. The BND paid Dannenbaum $15.4 million of $21.4 million
spent toward developing a still non-existent international bridge at the Port of
Brownsville. But, he continued consulting for TEDSI until last year. Lucio's
prior financial statements show that in 2007 TEDSI paid him from $10,000 to
$24,999 and $25,000 or more in prior years. Lucio had been on CorPlan's payroll
since 1999. Aguirre, MTC and Dannenbaum then contracted him, but in interviews
prior to 2004 he wouldn't specifically say when or how much each paid him. It
was not until 2004 that Lucio started specifically listing the companies that
retained him in his financial statements and these, coupled with prior
interviews with the senator, reflect that the five firms paid him at least
$340,000. Embattled former Willacy County District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra
obtained an indictment against Lucio last year, charging him with profiting from
the elected office. Administrative Judge Manuel Bañales Jr. dismissed the
indictment following arguments from Lucio's attorney, Michael R. Cowen, that the
indictment was defective and that Guerra was seeking revenge against those who
he perceived to be his political enemies.
February 4, 2009 Brownsville Herald
A federal investigation into contraband and narcotics trafficking in the Willacy
County Detention Center in Raymondville netted the arrest of a guard in early
January, court records show. This was not placed in the public record in the
U.S. Southern District of Texas until Tuesday, however. A special agent with the
U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General arrested
Thomas Najera, of Raymondville, on Jan. 8 for possession of approximately 28
grams of cocaine with intent to distribute it, according to a criminal complaint
against the guard. During the course of an investigation, a special agent
received information from an informant that Najera was smuggling narcotics into
the facility for several inmates, the complaint says. The facility houses
inmates under contract with the federal government. The complaint notes that
Najera would charge a fee based on the type of material he was asked to smuggle.
The special agent received further information that on Jan. 8 Najera was going
to accept cocaine for delivery to a detainee in the center. The special agent
conducted surveillance and at 8:45 p.m. on that date spotted Najera meeting a
woman at the Wal-Mart parking lot in Raymondville. The woman gave Najera a small
object, according to the complaint. The special agent and other agents
approached Najera, searched a vehicle he was occupying and found the cocaine.
Najera was arrested and U.S. Magistrate Judge Felix Recio set a $50,000 bond,
requiring a $2,000 deposit. Najera was released from federal custody in
mid-January when the deposit was paid with instructions not to travel into
Mexico, refrain from drug use, possession of drugs, or excessive alcohol
consumption, and obtain a telephone line. Najera also could be subjected to
random urine analysis. A private firm, Management & Training Corporation,
operates and manages the detention center for Willacy County.
October 29, 2008 Raymondville Chronicle News
Willacy County's commissioners voted to give Sheriff Larry Spence $202,000
so he can make his construction bond payment of $439,000 for the county jail,
which is due Nov. 1st. Commissioners also acted to pay down $3 million on the
jail's principal debt of about $7.5 million, so the sheriff will be in a better
position to make future bond payments. In past years the county has had to bail
the sheriff out, so he could make bond payments, and not put the county in
default. The $3 million would come from a $6 million revenue fee account from
the 3,000 bed ICE Unit. Commissioners also voted unanimously to send a
resolution to state and federal legislators expressing concern over recent
firings of MTC workers at the 3,000 bed ICE Unit, due to a change in federal
employment policies. Of concern to Judge Protem Emilio "Junior" Vera and
Commissioner Eddie Chapa are dozens of MTC employee being fired, because their
personal credit scores are below a certain level. "We've got a lot of good
employees being fired," Vera said. "I spoke with an ICE official in San Antonio
and said the county is concerned." The county's unemployment rate was 21 percent
before the ICE Unit was built, and had dropped to eight percent just before the
policy change, according to the resolution. The resolution states in part.
"Willacy County ..... is deeply concerned regarding policy changes ... that will
negatively impact the retention of local workforce." Employees at the ICE Unit
sent a petition to U.S. Cong. Solomon Ortiz (D-Corpus Christi) several months
asking for his help and intervention. Ortiz told the Chronicle/News is a prior
interview that he was concerned as well.
May 11, 2008 Washington Post
Neil Sampson, who ran the DIHS as interim director most of last year, left that
job with serious questions about the government's commitment. Sampson said in an
interview that ICE treated detainee health care "as an afterthought," reflecting
what he called a failure of leadership and management at the Homeland Security
Department. "They do not have a clear idea or philosophy of their approach to
health care [for detainees]," he said. "It's a system failure, not a failure of
individuals." A new director for health services arrived six months ago,
following a stretch when the agency was run first by Sampson and then by a
second interim director. The new boss is LaMont W. Flanagan, who brought with
him the credential of having been fired in 2003 by the state of Maryland for bad
management and spending practices supervising detention and pretrial services.
An audit found that Flanagan had signed off on payments of $145,000 for employee
entertainment and other ill-advised expenditures. His reputation was such that
the District of Columbia would not hire him for a juvenile-justice position.
"Another death that needs to be added to the roster," Diane Aker, the DIHS chief
health administrator, tapped out in an e-mail to a records clerk at headquarters
on Aug. 14, 2007. Juan Guevara-Lorano, 21, was dead. Guevara, an unemployed
legal U.S. resident with a young son, was arrested in El Paso for driving
illegal border-crossers farther into the city. He was paid $50. An entry-level
emergency medical technician, with barely any training, had done Guevara's
intake screening and physical assessment at the Otero County immigration
compound in New Mexico. Under DIHS rules, those tasks are supposed to be done by
a nurse. After two difficult months in detention, Guevara had decided not to
appeal his case. He would go back to Mexico with his family. But on Aug. 4, he
came down with a splitting headache, what he called a nine on a pain scale of
10, his medical records show. The rookie medical technician prescribed Tylenol
and referred Guevara to the compound's physician "due to severity of headache
... and dizziness," according to medical records. But Guevara never saw a
doctor. Eight days after the first incident, he vomited in his cell. The same
junior technician came to help but was unable to insert a nasal airway tube.
Guevara was taken to a hospital, where doctors determined an aneurism in his
brain had burst. His wife, pregnant at the time with their second child,
recalled that she rushed to the hospital but ICE guards would not let her
inside, until the Mexican Consulate interceded. Guevara's mother waited five
hours before they let her in. By then he was brain-dead. "My son is not coming
back," sobbed Ana Celia Lozano months later, sitting in Guevara's small mobile
home as her grandson played on the floor. "I want to know how he lived and died,
nothing more." What appears to be the most incriminating document in Guevara's
case has been partially blacked out. Still, what is left shows that he did not
receive adequate care. "The detainee was not seen or evaluated by an RN,
midlevel or physician. . . . At the time of the incident on 8/12/2007, the
detainee was seen and examined by EMTs." Each immigration facility is allotted a
different number of positions, and a shortage of doctors and nurses is not
unusual at centers across the country. Records from February show that about 30
percent of all DIHS positions in the field were unfilled. ICE officials said
last week that the current vacancy rate is 21 percent. Concern about the
vacancies is voiced repeatedly at clinical directors' meetings. "How do we state
our concerns so that we can be heard? . . . this is a CRITICAL condition. . . .
We have bitten off more than we can chew," a physician wrote in the minutes of
one meeting last summer. In some prisons, the staffing shortages are acute. The
Willacy County detention center in South Texas -- the largest compound, with
2,018 detainees -- has no clinical director, no pharmacist and only a part-time
psychiatrist. Nearly 50 percent of the nursing positions were unfilled at the
1,500-detainee Eloy, Ariz., prison in February. At the newly opened 744-bed
Jena., La., compound, nurses run the place. It has no clinical director, no
staff physician, no psychiatrist and no professional dental staff. Last August,
Sampson, who was then DIHS interim director, warned his superiors at ICE that
critical personnel shortages were making it impossible to staff the Jena
facility adequately. In a vociferous e-mail to Gary Mead, the ICE deputy
director in charge of detention centers, he wrote: "With the Jena request we
have been re-examining our capabilities to meet health care needs at a new site
when we are facing critical staffing shortages at most every other DIHS site.
While we developed, executed and achieved major successes in our recruitment
efforts we have been unable to meet the demand." The slow ICE security-clearance
process forced many job applicants to go elsewhere, Sampson wrote. Of the 312
people who applied for new positions over the past year, 200 withdrew, he wrote,
because they found other jobs during the 250 days it took ICE, on average, to
conduct the required background investigations. Last week, ICE officials said
the average wait had decreased recently to 37 days. These shortages have
burdened the remaining staff. In July 2007, a year after Osman's death in Otay
Mesa, medical director Hui strongly complained to headquarters about workload
stress. "The level of burnout . . . is high and rising," she wrote in an e-mail.
"I know that I have been averaging approximately 2-6 hrs of overtime daily for
the past 2 months. I will no longer be able to sustain this pace and will be
decreasing the number of hours that I work overtime. This being said, more will
be left undone because we simply do NOT have the staff." The overcrowding has
created a petri dish for the spread of diseases. One mission of the Public
Health Service is to detect infectious diseases and contain them before they
spread, but last summer, the gigantic Willacy center was hit by a chicken pox
outbreak. The illness spread because the facility did not have enough available
isolation rooms and its large pods share recycled air, but also because security
officers "lack education about the disease and keep moving around detainees from
different units without taking into consideration if the unit has been isolated
due to heavy exposure," noted the DIHS's top specialist on infectious diseases,
Carlos Duchesne. The staff was forced to vaccinate the entire population in
mid-July. In one 2007 death, memos and confidential notes show how medical staff
missed an infectious disease, meningitis, in their midst. Victor Alfonso
Arellano, 23, a transgender Mexican detainee with AIDS, died in custody at the
San Pedro center. The first three pages of Duchesne's internal review of the
death leave the impression that Arellano's care was proper. But the last page,
under the heading "Off the record observations and recommendations," takes a
decidedly critical tone: "The clinical staff at all levels fails to recognize
early signs and symptoms of meningitis. . . . Pt was evaluated multiple times
and an effort to rule out those infections was not even mentioned." Arellano was
given a "completely useless" antibiotic, Duchesne wrote. Lab work that should
have been performed immediately took 22 days because San Pedro's clinical
director had ordered staff members to withhold lab work for new detainees until
they had been in detention there "for more than 30 days," a violation of agency
rules. "I am sure that there must be a reason why this was mandated but that
practice is particularly dangerous with chronic care cases and specially is
particularly dangerous with . . . HIV/AIDS patients," Duchesne wrote. "Labs for
AIDS patients . . . must be performed ASAP to know their immune status and where
you are standing in reference to disease control and meds." Given the frequency
with which ICE moves people within the detention network, keeping track of
detainees is critical to stopping the spread of infectious illnesses. The
purchase of an electronic records system named CaseTrakker in 2004 was supposed
to help. But according to internal documents and interviews, CaseTrakker is so
riddled with problems that facilities often revert to handwritten records. A
study at one site found that it took one-third more time to use CaseTrakker than
to use paper. Thousands of patient files are missing. Recorded data often cannot
be retrieved. Day-long outages are common. When detainees are transferred from
one facility to another, their records, if they follow them, are often
misleading. Some show medications with no medical diagnoses, or "lots of
diagnoses but no meds," according to Elizabeth Fleming, a former clinical
director at one compound in Arizona. After Yusif Osman's death and the discovery
of the problem with his computerized records, the DIHS ordered a review of all
charts at the Otay Mesa center. During the review, auditors also found that 260
physical exams were never completed as required. The nurse responsible for the
error in Osman's case was reprimanded, but the computer problem was not fixed.
The CaseTrakker system "has failed and must be replaced," Sampson, the DIHS
interim director, wrote to his ICE supervisors in August. In January 2008,
medical director Shack told colleagues that CaseTrakker "is more of a liability
than the use of paper medical record system," according to the minutes of a
meeting. It "puts patients at risk." ICE officials said last week that they are
not satisfied with CaseTrakker and are working to replace it. Along with being
at the mercy of computer glitches, detainees suffer from human errors that deny
or delay their care. And with few advocates on the outside, they are left alone
to plead their cases in the most desperate ways, in hand-scribbled notes to
doctors they rarely see. "I need medicine for pain. All my bones hurt. Thank
you," wrote Mexico native Roberto Ledesma Guerrero, 72, three weeks before he
died inside the Otay Mesa compound. Delays persist throughout the system. In
January, the detention center in Pearsall, Tex., an hour from San Antonio, had a
backlog of 2,097 appointments. Luis Dubegel-Paez, a 60-year-old Cuban, had
filled out many sick call requests before he died on March 14. Detained at the
Rolling Plains Detention Facility in the West Texas town of Haskell, he wrote on
New Year's Day: "need to see doctor for Heart medication; and having chest pains
for the past three days. Can't stand pain." Ten days later he went to the clinic
and became upset when he wasn't seen. He slugged the window, yelled, pointed at
his wristwatch. He was escorted back to his cell. Another of his sick call
requests said: "Need to see a doctor. I have a lot of symptoms of sickness ...
as soon as possible!" The next was more urgent: "I have a emergency to see the
doctor about my heart problems ... for the last couple days and I been getting
dizzy a lot." The next day, Dubegel-Paez collapsed and died. His medical records
do not show that he ever saw a doctor for his chest pains.
April 9, 2008 KRGV 5
The owners of the Willacy County detention center say they're investigating
allegations an employee stole from a detainee. Representatives of the M & T
Corporation say they can't comment because it's an ongoing investigation. But
NEWSCHANNEL 5 learned a guard is accused of stealing property and money from a
detainee. We spoke to J.C. Conner, the company's regional vice president on the
phone. He confirms the investigation. He adds, "By policy, we carefully maintain
every detainee's property. If any of it is missing, it is promptly replaced in
its entirety." The company is contracted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
ICE officials aren't commenting much at this time. They did release a similar
statement. It read, "When ICE or MTC receives information that could affect the
safety and security of those housed in the center, we conduct a thorough
internal investigation. The details of such investigations, including the
existence of an investigation, are not a matter of public record. If evidence of
criminal law violation is encountered, it is immediately reported to the
appropriate law enforcement agency." This is the second time within a year
employees at the facility are being investigated. Last year, four guards were
arrested after they allegedly used a company van to cross illegals past the
Sarita checkpoint.
November 16, 2007 Valley Morning Star
A federal judge has set cash bonds of $150,000 on two detention
center officers accused in what authorities say was an illegal immigrant
smuggling ring operating out of the Willacy County Detention Center.
Juan Treviño Jr., 27, and Alberto Vasquez, 37, both of Harlingen,
appeared Friday before U.S. Magistrate Felix Recio. Recio originally set
Treviño’s bond at $50,000, which would have allowed him to post $5,000
cash. But the judge raised the amount to match the bond for Vasquez
after hearing testimony from a federal agent that Treviño is believed to
be the ringleader of what he called a smuggling operation. Recio said he
had made a mistake by setting a lower bond for Treviño and raised it.
The agent said in court that the ring had smuggled illegal immigrants on
more than one occasion, and Vasquez was a driver of a van that
transported them. Federal investigators have charged the men with
operating a smuggling operation in which illegal immigrants who were
picked up at locations around Harlingen were transported in a van owned
by the company that provides security at the detention center in
Raymondville. They are charged with conspiring to transport illegal
immigrants between Sept. 1 and Nov. 8. Treviño and Vasquez will be moved
as soon as possible to Corpus Christi, where co-defendants Carlos Miguel
Garcia, 36, and Benjamin Lopez Sanchez, 36, of Raymondville, are being
held on charges that they were involved in the smuggling ring. Treviño
and Vasquez were sergeants at the detention center in Raymondville while
Garcia and Sanchez were detention officers there, officials said. The
four worked for Utah-based Management Training Corp., which provides
security services for the detention center, authorities said.
November 13, 2007 Valley Morning Star
Two more Willacy County immigration detention center officers, both from
Harlingen, are facing charges in connection with transporting
undocumented immigrants, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said Tuesday. Two
others from Raymondville were arrested last week. Detention center
sergeants Juan Treviño Jr., 27, and Albert Vasquez, 37, both of
Harlingen, were arrested Sunday at their homes and are charged with
conspiring to transport undocumented immigrants between Sept. 1 and Nov.
8, according to a news release from U.S. Attorney Don DeGabrielle’s
office. Detention center officers Carlos Miguel Garcia, 36, and Benjamin
Lopez Sanchez, 36, both of Raymondville, are accused of attempting to
drive 28 undocumented immigrants past the Sarita checkpoint Thursday,
the news release states. The two were taken into custody early Friday.
Treviño and Sanchez are charged separately in a criminal complaint filed
Sunday. Their arrests were the result of an investigation by special
agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The four men
worked as detention officers for the Utah-based Management Training
Corp., which provides security services for the Willacy County Detention
Center in Raymondville, according to the release. Officials allege that
Treviño recruited Vasquez, Garcia and Sanchez to pick up and transport
immigrants who were smuggled into the country through locations near
Harlingen past the Sarita checkpoint using MTC company vehicles,
according to the news release. The 28 undocumented immigrants who were
transported Thursday were not being held at the Willacy County Detention
Center, Angela Dodge, a public affairs specialist with the U.S.
Attorney’s Office, said. The undocumented immigrants had been picked up
at various locations, including a canal and a soccer field, the release
states. Garcia and Sanchez were wearing MTC uniforms and officials found
a loaded .357 magnum pistol in the center console of the van when they
attempted to drive the MTC F-450 van past the checkpoint Thursday,
according to the release. Customs and Border Protection agents at the
checkpoint became suspicious because the van was overcrowded, some
passengers were sitting on the vehicle floor, none were shackled and
many had luggage, the release states. Earlier that day, an anonymous
caller told CBP agents that a vehicle carrying undocumented immigrants
and driven by law enforcement officers was headed toward the checkpoint
from Harlingen, according to the release. Garcia and Sanchez provided
CBP agents with a transport log and said they were transporting 28
prisoners from the Willacy County Detention facility to San Antonio, the
release states. Through contact with detention center officials, CBP
agents determined there was no record that Garcia and Sanchez picked up
28 prisoners from the detention facility, according to the release. Four
of the 28 have been designated as material witnesses and five others
have been charged with illegal re-entry into the United States after a
previous deportation or removal. The 28 were identified as nationals of
Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador,
according to the release. Calls to MTC officials Tuesday were not
immediately returned.
November 9, 2007 San Antonio News-Express
Two employees of the private company that manages the U.S.
immigration detention center in Raymondville have been arrested for
allegedly attempting to smuggle 28 undocumented immigrants through an
inland Border Patrol checkpoint, federal officials said Friday. U.S.
Border Patrol agents stopped the vans full of immigrants at the Sarita
checkpoint at around midnight Thursday. They took the employees into
federal custody after determining they did not have authority to bring
detainees through the checkpoint. The U.S. attorney's office is
investigating, Immigration and Customs and Enforcement spokeswoman Nina
Pruneda said. As of late Friday afternoon, charges still were pending.
"We are working as we speak with this case," she said. "As far as we're
concerned, it's still part of an ongoing investigation. The checkpoint,
which is 45 miles north of Raymondville and about 90 miles north of the
Mexican border, marks the end of the Border Patrol saturation zone for
the eastern end of the Rio Grande Valley. Once past, smugglers consider
themselves "home free" and the street value of narcotics rises
dramatically. There are similar checkpoints on U.S. 281 at Falfurrias
and north of Laredo on Interstate 35. The employees worked for the
Centerville, Utah-based Management & Training Corp. A spokesman for the
company did not return a call made to his cell phone late Friday. The
2,000-bed detention center opened after a rush of construction in 2006,
in the wake of President Bush's vow to end a "catch and release"
practice that was blamed on lack of detention space. Under the practice,
non-Mexican detainees were set free with a "notice to appear" before an
immigration judge. Few did. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
contracts with Willacy County for the facility, and the county contracts
with MTC to run it. The county recently has entered into an agreement to
expand the facility by another 1,000 beds.
June 24, 2007 Valley Morning Star
Immigrant rights groups Sunday stood in front of a 2,000-bed federal detention
center here, calling on the government to “Shut down tent city.” With cries like
“No human is illegal,” about 75 demonstrators came from as far as San Antonio
and Del Rio to protest the largest detention center in the United States. When
it opened last year, federal officials touted the futuristic compound as a
centerpiece in the government’s crackdown on illegal immigration. “Our main
objective is to raise awareness of this tent city and to the separation of
families,” said Elizabeth Garcia, a Brownsville activist who spearheaded the
protest. “These are families who bought a house with their savings. They bought
a piece of land,” she said of detainees. The demonstration marked the first
protest of the $60 million detention center since its tent-like domes sprung up
last summer. “It’s important for us to realize that we’re condoning this in our
own backyard,” Garcia said. Over loud speakers, protesters called for an end to
deportations at the detention center that holds illegal immigrants before
they’re deported to their home countries. “There’s a lot of people who have
children who are American citizens,” said Juan Torres, an activist from Weslaco.
“How can you say a child has committed a crime? Does that mean the father’s
alleged crime transcends to his children?” Jay Johnson Castro, who grabbed
national headlines as he walked the border in protest of the planned border
fence, called the detention center “a concentration camp.” “This is the battle
front of America right here,” he told reporters. “This is the largest
concentration camp on Planet Earth.” Others cited the detention center’s
windowless design as inhumane.
July 26, 2006 Valley Morning Star
The county may be spending more than necessary to build a new detention
center for illegal immigrants, Willacy County Attorney Juan Angel Guerra charged
Monday. Guerra said that the companies behind the $60.6 million detention center
over-billed the county by more than $15 million. Other companies could have
constructed the project's 10 Kevlar-covered domes for $30 million to $35
million, Guerra said. "Nobody questioned it," Guerra said of county
commissioners who voted 3-2 last week to borrow $60.6 million to build the
2,000-bed detention center. "The price is just ridiculous. Nobody did a
comparison," Guerra said. "They spend more time when they buy a truck or a
tractor, to call dealerships to see if they can get a better deal." Last month,
commissioners entered into a two-year contract with the U.S. Department of
Homeland Security to build the detention center that's part of a national
crackdown on illegal immigration. In a contract, companies behind the project
put the cost of construction materials at $20 million and the labor costs at $30
million, Guerra said. Commissioners planned to issue about $50 million to fund
the project. But costs jumped to $60.6 million to include $3 million to buy
equipment to operate the detention center, $3 million to set up a reserve fund
and $3 million in interest payments. Guerra pointed to four areas in which he
said the contractor "inflated" costs. While Kevlar material costs $3.3 million,
the contractor billed the county for $4.6 million, Guerra said. While the
contractor billed the county for $3.6 million to prepare the 53-acre site for
construction, other companies said they could have done the job for $1.6
million, Guerra said. The contractor billed the county for $2.8 million for
sewer work, but other companies said they could have done the job for $800,000.
And other companies said paving the asphalt parking lot would cost $150,000, the
contractor billed the county for $400,000, Guerra said. "We cannot justify these
costs," Guerra said.
July 23, 2006 Express News
The Willacy County attorney is speaking out against his county's new
contract for a massive detention center because he said it involves companies
still under a cloud from the 2004 bribery convictions of three elected
officials. Juan Angel Guerra also accuses veteran Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr.,
D-Brownsville, of going back on his word by continuing to represent the same
firms. Former Willacy County Commissioners Israel Tamez and the late Jose
Jimenez were convicted in 2004 of accepting bribes in exchange for favorable
votes regarding a 600-bed prison that opened in Raymondville, the county seat,
in 2003. The third convicted official, Webb County Commissioner David Cortez,
was an associate of CorPlan Corrections, a consulting company at the time of the
prison project. Cortez was accused of funneling the bribe money for favorable
votes on contracts. No company employees, however, have been charged. Federal
prosecutors wouldn't comment on the case, but observers believe the
investigation is ongoing because the commissioners' sentencing dates have been
pushed back several times. Meanwhile, the same firms are building a 2,000-bed
detention facility near the same prison. Willacy commissioners voted 3-2 on
Monday to approve $60.6 million in bonds for the new facility, which is on a
fast-track construction schedule to house mostly non-Mexican undocumented
immigrants in a series of tentlike structures for U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement, or ICE. Utah-based Management Training Corp., or MTC, will operate
the facility; Houston-based Hale-Mills Construction Inc. is building it; and
Argyle-based CorPlan is consulting on the project, said Guerra, who is the
county and district attorney. A May 27, 2005, letter from commissioners to the
county's nonprofit corporation set up to oversee the federal prison project
asked it to "terminate its contractual relationship with CorPlan," because a
Willacy County lawsuit against the firm alleged it was involved with the bribes.
"Now they are asking me to sign a contract that includes CorPlan," Guerra said.
"I told the commissioners you can't have it both ways. First you pass the
resolution saying you don't want to deal with CorPlan. Now you do a contract
that I know for a fact includes CorPlan. So we are back to square one." The
lawsuit was dropped in April. County Judge Simon Salinas said he wasn't aware of
the letter and resolution that prompted it. It's probably too late anyway, he
added. "The contract is already signed, the work is already begun," he said.
Regardless, Salinas said, the county can't proceed under the assumption that
leaders of the companies are criminals. "In this country we are innocent until
proven guilty," he said. "And nobody out there pressed charges against the
companies. ... Just because these (commissioners) plead guilty doesn't mean
everybody in the world is guilty." Guerra favored Tennessee-based Corrections
Corporation of America, or CCA, which offered to finance the detention facility
on its own rather than through the county. He said the commissioners initially
favored CCA, but later picked MTC. Commissioner Noe Loya said Guerra "is trying
to find every excuse to hire CCA, and change our minds, but it's over." Guerra
said he met with Lucio two weeks ago and the veteran lawmaker pushed MTC. "I
asked him, 'Are you talking to me as my senator or as an employee of one of
these companies?'" Guerra said. "He told me he was talking to me as a
consultant." Lucio said he met with Guerra because it "appeared that he had
quite a bit of influence on the Commissioners Court." Lucio said he told Guerra
he favored MTC because it treats its employees well. Lucio said he thought
CorPlan had been cleared because the lawsuit filed on behalf of Willacy County
against James Parkey, president of CorPlan, was dropped and there have been no
other arrests. Parkey did not return a call seeking comment. "My main focus on
talking with Johnny (Guerra) was trying to sell him on the fact that MTC was a
very reputable company," Lucio said. "I feel very comfortably speaking on their
behalf and asking them to consider us and that was my main focus." According to
the Texas Ethics Commission, Lucio reported in 2005 that MTC and CorPlan paid
him a total of at least $50,000 through his Brownsville company, Rio Shelters
Inc. In the wake of the bribery scandal, Lucio said he had stopped representing
the firms and wouldn't again until the matter was cleared up. "I know there has
been a case, a problem, a situation there where somebody associated with (Parkey)
out of Laredo was indicted and convicted," Lucio said, referring to Cortez. "But
when the lawsuit against him was dropped, I felt that he was exonerated." Told
that the bribery investigation may still be open, he said: "If it is, I am not
aware of it." Asked if he was being paid by MTC or CorPlan for encouraging the
detention center contract, he said: "It's up to them if they feel I did a good
job." Lucio said it was "very hard to draw a fine line" between his job as a
lawmaker and his private work, but added: "I can tell you this: I do my best."
"I get paid $600 a month to be a state senator, and I do it just about on a
full-time basis," he said. Damon Hiniger, a vice president of CCA in Tennessee,
said he was surprised by the county's decision because CCA was going to invest
its own money, pay about $1.8 million in property taxes, and shoulder the risk.
Judge Salinas said he was influenced by the bottom line, nothing more. "I have
nothing against CCA, they are a good reputable company, but they are in the
business to make their own bucks," he said. The detention facility is to open
Aug. 1 with 500 beds, and then have 1,500 more available Oct. 1. It is part of
President Bush's Secure Border Initiative.
July 20, 2006 Valley Morning Star
State Sen. Eddie Lucio resumed consulting work with a
company that he says offers Willacy County hundreds of jobs and a steady flow of
revenue for years to come. Last year, Lucio suspended business with Management
Training Corp. and two other companies involved in the development of a $14.5
million prison project that was the focus of a federal bribery investigation.
That investigation led to the convictions of former Willacy County commissioners
Israel Tamez and Jose Jimenez. In letters to the companies, Lucio wrote he was
taking "a leave of absence" from consulting work "until this matter is
resolved." At the time, Lucio asked the Texas Attorney General's Office and the
state Ethics Commission to review his work as a consultant. "I can do business
with companies that do business with the federal government," Lucio said the
agencies determined. Lucio resumed work for MTC as the company sought a Willacy
County contract to operate a $60.6 million detention center to hold illegal
immigrants. Last week, commissioners voted 3-2 to give MTC a two-year contract
to operate the detention center. "They're an outstanding operation," Lucio said
of the Utah-based company that operates a 525-bed county-owned prison here.
Lucio declined to disclose his fee. Monday, commissioners voted 3-2 to issue
$60.6 million in bonds to build the detention center that's part of the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security's crackdown on illegal immigration. "I think
Willacy County will come out ahead," Lucio said. "I think it's a wonderful
opportunity for hundreds of jobs." Lucio said his work with MTC was limited to a
meeting with County Attorney Juan Angel Guerra. In the meeting, Lucio talked 30
to 45 minutes with Guerra, who recommended that commissioners hire Corrections
Corporation of America, which proposed working with investors to fund the
project's costs. "He had questions whether MTC was a reputable company," said
Lucio, who owns Rio Consulting in Brownsville. "He was very, very out to get the
commissioners to hire CCA. All we did was talk about the qualifications of MTC
and why it would be a better deal." Under MTC's contract, the county will own
the detention center, Lucio said. "It's a ($60) million asset at the end," Lucio
said, referring to county payments that run through 2009. "This is going to be a
... facility for the future. They can continue the same situation. I'm going to
push MTC to make sure they fulfill the wishes of Willacy County. What we need to
do is insure that inmates are brought to that facility." Lucio said he stood
behind company projections that show the federal government will fill the
detention center with more than 1,800 illegal immigrants. "The federal
government is in dire need," Lucio said of detention center beds. County
commissioners Aurelio Guerra and Abiel Cantu voted against hiring MTC because
they questioned whether the federal government could fill the detention center
with illegal immigrants for which the company would pay at least $2.25 a head.
But steps such as hiring more U.S. Border Patrol agents and the placement of
National Guard troops along the border will increase arrests of illegal
immigrants, Lucio said. "Even President Bush is beefing up the border," he said.
"(But) nothing is going to stop people from (crossing the border) to seek the
American dream. I think more people are going to get caught." Cantu and Aurelio
Guerra also voted against the company's hiring because they argued that the
federal government would restrict the county from spending detention center
revenues on county expenditures. Lucio said he did not know the specifics of the
contract. "That's up to the Commissioners Court to look into the specifics of
the contract," he said. Lucio denied Juan Angel Guerra's claim that he was
working for Corplan Corrections, an Irving-based prison consulting firm, in the
detention center project. Juan Angel Guerra said Lucio told him that he worked
for James Parkey, Corplan's president. Last year, Lucio said he suspended ties
with Corplan, MTC and Aguirre Corp. of Dallas after Tamez and Jimenez pleaded
guilty to taking more than $10,000 in bribes in exchange for votes to hire a
consultant in the $14.5 million prison project that the companies helped to
develop. Lucio said he resumed work with Corplan after McAllen attorney Ramon
Garcia, Hidalgo County's judge, dropped a lawsuit against Corplan and
Houston-based Hale Mills construction in April. "When they were exonerated ...
it cleared the path," Lucio said. "I work for them anytime I like to. I like Mr.
Parkey. He's a good man. As far as I'm concerned, he's a reputable person."
However, Lucio said his work with Corplan did not involve the detention center
project. Last month, Willacy County commissioners entered into a two-year
contract with Homeland Security to construct tent-like domes to hold 500 beds by
Aug. 2. As part of the contract, the detention center will expand to 2,000 beds
within 90 days.
July 16, 2006 Valley Morning Star
Federal officials said last week that it's not their intention to fill up a
2,000-bed detention center that would hold illegal immigrants before
deportation. But Willacy County commissioners are banking on a private prison
company that claims the federal government will pay the county nearly $12
million to house 2,000 prisoners there. "I can't guarantee those numbers," Nina
Pruneda, spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Immigration
and Customs Enforcement in San Antonio, said of the inmate count. "It's not a
question of filling beds," she said. "It's making sure we have operational beds
ready." The $50 million detention center made up of 10 Kevlar-covered domes is
part of the federal government's national crackdown on illegal immigration,
officials said. Last month, county commissioners entered into a two-year
contract with Homeland Security in the construction of tent-like domes to house
500 beds by Aug. 2. As part of the contract, the detention center would expand
to 2,000 beds within 90 days. This month, commissioners picked Utah-based
Management Training Corp. to operate the detention center. But the Willacy
County Local Government Corp., a nonprofit board organized to oversee the
project, failed to ratify the contract. Thursday, commissioners held off on the
issue of $50 million in bonds amid concerns that the federal government may not
fill up the detention center with prisoners for whom it would pay a daily rate
per detainee. In South Texas, the new detention center would boost the number of
beds open to illegal immigrants to 5,200, Pruneda said. The agency decided to
build the Willacy County detention center rather than expand its detention
center in Port Isabel, which houses 800 beds, Pruneda said. "The decision to
open a facility in Willacy was an operational decision," she said. Wednesday,
consultants warned that the federal government would likely restrict the county
to the expenditure of "administrative" fees of as little as $2.25 a day per
prisoner. The "county's current approach may open the county to substantial
liability to the federal government," warned the law firm of Akin Gump Strauss
Hauer & Feld of Washington, D.C. The consultants noted the federal contract
specifies the county "shall not charge for costs which are not directly related
to the housing and detention of detainees." "It specifically identifies costs
for which the county may not charge, such as certain salaries, indirect costs
and services and facilities that are not used by the federal detainees," the
consultants wrote. The consultants cited a case in which Homeland Security
required Pennsylvania's York County to return as much as $58.5 million after it
allegedly spent detention center revenue on unauthorized expenses.
July 12, 2006 Valley Morning Star
The new detention center for illegal immigrants may not be the financial
windfall that county officials imagine, the county attorney said. Willacy County
Attorney Juan Angel Guerra warned commissioners that the federal government may
restrict the spending of money generated by a new $50 million detention center.
A contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security restricts spending to
the detention of illegal immigrants, Guerra told commissioners. "It is very
clear that you have to justify every single amount of money and if you can't
justify it, the money goes back" to Homeland Security's U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement, Guerra told commissioners in a Monday meeting. Last month,
the county entered into a contract with Homeland Security to sell $50 million in
bonds to develop a 2,000-bed detention center to house illegal immigrants. In
the meeting, Guerra warned that Homeland Security required Pennsylvania's York
County to return as much as $58.5 million allegedly spent on unauthorized
expenses.
July 6, 2006 San Antonio Express-News
Willacy County officials haven't formally decided who will get to build the
state's largest immigration detention facility — but that hasn't stopped a
Houston company from beginning work on the massive project. Hale-Mills
Construction has had crews at the site of the planned $50 million jail for the
past two weeks, leveling land and pouring concrete for the foundation. The
company began working on the 2,000-bed facility after county officials signed an
agreement June 19 with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to house
detainees. Without a county decision on how to pay for it or, more importantly,
who would be hired to build it, Hale-Mills began clearing a cotton field in
Raymondville the next day. County officials are working out other details, such
as how the county will pay for the facility's construction and if Hale-Mills
will build it, Vela said. County Judge Simon Salinas said the company is working
at its own risk and has no guarantees it will be chosen to finish the job. The
county formed the public facilities corporation to issue $50 million in lease
revenue bonds to investors to fund construction. Although no bonds have been
issued and the county hasn't identified the corporation's governing board, that
board is set to meet today to pick officers, consider hiring Vela as its lawyer
and consider approving a contract with Hale-Mills. It will also consider hiring
a private jail company to operate the facility after it is completed.
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